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THE DESTINY OF THE RACES OF THIS CONTINENT. 



AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 



BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 



ON THE 26th OF JANUARY, 1859. 



BY FRANE: p. BLAIR, JR., 

OF MISSOURI. 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 

BUELL & BLANCHARD, PRINTERS. 
1859. 



ADDEESS OF MR BLAIR. 



Mr. Blair was introduced by John H. Pillsbury, Esq., President of 
the Association, and said : 

M}-. President and Ladies and Gentlemen : 

The presumption of appearing in this place, so exalted, argues a 
temerity of which I beg you to believe me incapable, of my own mere 
motion. I have been pressed into this adventure by good friends, who 
would not have me forfeit, by failure, here, the little reputation that I 
have at home. They must, then, rely upon the generous sympathies 
of this refined audience to disarm criticism in favor of one who hazards 
himself at their bidding, to gratify you with the novelty of a backwoods- 
man in the literary character of a lecturer for Boston. I deprecate, in 
advance, all judgment of my eifort by the standard you are accustomed 
to apply. Born and bred among the hunters of Kentucky, attaining 
manhood in Missouri while still the Far West, and finishing my educa- 
tion as a companion of the Rangers of the Rocky Mountains, I should 
deserve derision if I came here to make a display of scholarship or elo- 
quence, here, where a long line of illustrious orators, filling the first half 
of this century with an eloquent renown, vieing with that conferred by 
the great masters of the art of oratory upon Athens and Rome, is suc- 
ceeded by another, which now promises to keep the crown for the Bay 
State, and its academic city, for centuries to come. The inspiration 
which thus triumphs through successive generations had its origin in 
that blood from which has arisen the lofty monument that looks down 
upon your city, its surrounding hills and villas, and the rolling ocean. 
That inspiration has lifted up a loftier and more enduring monument 
in the divine power of epic speech, which has given your city an eleva- 
tion and illumination which attracts the eye of all our land, and sheds 
its rays beyond the Atlantic. Here the throes of the Revolution gave 
birth to the infant Hercules, that in this cradle crushed the Hydras of 
a vast military power, and by this first labor quickened the heroic spirit 
now throbbing in the bosoms of the oppressed throughout the world. 
Here is the forum where Freedom nerved eloquence to exhort to its 
achievement and secure its conquests forever on this continent. I do 



not assert pretensions to the least of the attributes that have Tvorked 
these miracles, much less to emulate the glory of the gifted men who 
have employed them all in the service of the country. I come to invoke 
those who now flourish, to bring the commanding influence they inherit 
to assist in this conjuncture of the Republic which is to shape the des- 
tiny of the races of this continent, and sway it, to give a new impulse 
to the vital principle. Liberty, which its enemies would crush under 
the shields made to protect it. 

I desire to present to the young merchants of Boston, upon whose 
invitation I speak, two great practical questions, largely afiecting their 
own profession, and worthy of their serious consideration. One is the 
great enterprise which is to pour the commerce of India and the East 
through the heart of our country by means of a great national highway 
between the oceans, spreading the people of our own race across the 
great temperate zone. The other, to create a new empire for their com- 
merce within the tropics of America, requiring for its maintenance 
the peculiar organization of the colored races ; and both enterprises con- 
curring with an irresistible power, by severing their unnatural connec- 
tion, to exalt the destiny of all the races of this continent. That the 
races are discriminated by indelible marks of difierence, appears to sug- 
gest to some persons only the idea of superior and inferior races, and 
that the one was made to be enslaved by the other. It does not appear 
to me to follow, even if the superiority of one race is established, that 
therefore the inferior races are made for its service. On the contrary, 
it is to me a conclusive argument against blending them in the same 
community, to deteriorate the superior by admixture or contact with the 
inferior races, and to create caste, which experience shows is disastrous 
to all alike. But, with the history of the whole world before us, it is 
strange that any one should not see that the marked distinctions be- 
tween the races indicate this adaptability to the various climates of our 
earth, as plainly and conclusively as the vegetable life of each zone 
proclaims the climate which produced it. That when we see the white 
race wither under the tropics, or change the pale face for the darker 
hues which distinguish the children of the sun, any one should close 
his eyes to the lesson it teaches, that the races are made for or made 
by the climate in which they dwell, and, like the flora and fauna of a 
land, will flourish only in a congenial clime. 

Upon this continent there are regions suited to each of the races that 
inhabit it — transport them to others unsuited, and they deteriorate. 
The proud Spaniard, whose courage and vigor gave him the wealth of 
the American tropics, has already become efiete ; and the negro, brought 
thither in chains to minister to his pleasure, is now fast rising to be- 
come the ruling race in those regions, gaining rapidly in number, and 
threatening to overwhelm all others. It is time that this great nation 
should accept a truth, which the Almighty has so plainly written on all 
his works, and adopt a policy in harmony with His will, which neither 
nations nor individuals can violate with impunity. What the policy of 
the Government has been touching this great concern, what it shall be 
in the future in furtherance of the inevitable destiny of the races to re- 
sume their true zones on this continent, it is my design to consider. 



The present epoch is a new starting point in our Government. The 
impulse given by the movers of the Revolution has come to a pause, and 
all seems tending to receive a new direction. " Life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness," were the rights which it was the design of those 
who framed our institutions gradually to establish for all the races of 
our continent. Those great men knew that the current of public senti- 
ment flowed with full volume in that channel which their toil and their 
patriotism had worked out, not only for the freedom of those whose cour- 
age had conquered it, but for those even beyond the ocean who sympa- 
thized with the effort. But their first thought was for the races at home. 
Emancipation of the African slaves, that had been thrust upon our 
shores by the cupidity of our British oppressors and their minions here, 
was speedily accomplished throughout the northern part of the Confed- 
eracy, under the impulse which first prompted our fathers to assert their 
own freedom. Abolition of the slave trade, with a view to the same 
result ultimately in all the States, was the unanimous act of the nation ; 
and before this was done, to preclude an inducement for its continuance, 
the ordinance of 1787, excluding Slavery from all its Territories, was 
voted by the Confederation, before the Constitution existed to add its 
sanction. That other inferior race among us, the Indian, was recog- 
nised as having rights which the white man was bound to respect ; that 
personal liberty, of which their kindred tribes of the south had been 
deprived by the Spaniards, was recognised as a birthright, in which 
they were to be protected, as well as that quasi-ownership in the lands 
they occupied, of which they could not be divested without a compen- 
sation deemed by themselves an equivalent. The whole scope of the 
policy of the young Republic then embraced that grand leading idea on 
which our Declaration of Independence based our individual liberties, 
that all men are born equal in respect to that humanity which author- 
izes them to claim justice at the hands of every superior power, as the 
preservative of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which was 
inherent in their nature. The Constitution, it is true, permitted that 
portion of the African race which had been brought under our system 
of colonial bondage to be retained " as persons held to service ; " but 
in this very phrase it rejected the adoption of the law creating Slavery, 
and only recognised existing circumstances growing out of the tyranny 
it had overthrown, that "persons were held to service" whose obliga- 
tions it could not dissolve. So far from recognising the rightfulness of 
Slavery, the opprobrium of the term was rejected to exclude the infer- 
ence of its adoption as a national institution, and a clause was inserted 
authorizing Congress to pass that act abolishing the slave trade, and 
likening the seizure of a man, to bring him to the level of a brute and 
appropriate his labor, to that of stripping him of his goods at sea and 
throwing him to the sharks. The crime was stigmatized as piracy. No 
slave in Africa, or in any other part of the world, can lawfully be made 
a slave in America. This proves that neither the great charter of our 
Independence nor that of our Union ever contemplated Slavery as a 
national institution, or even one to be long perpetuated as local, to make 
slaves of the home-born race, when prohibited as to the foreign-born. 
Such was the policy in which our Republic was inaugurated, and 



6 

■v^-hicli it pursued as long as it retained the impulse given b}'^ its founders. 
Its Tvliole spirit has since been reversed, and its very life corroded by 
the canker of Slavery entailed upon us. I shall not trace the slow pro- 
gress of this insidious disease. It is sufficient to say that the Supreme 
Court — ever prone to assert the power of the few in its own power, and 
assimilate the Government to its own anti-republican organization — has 
overthrown the fundamental principles of all our law, and of our religion 
itself, which recognises every being with a soul, as a inan, and as hav- 
ing some rights that all men are bound to respect. In this decree the 
well-established precedents of every department of our Government are 
annulled, and the public opinion of the great body of this nation, and 
the construction given of the Constitution by the uninterrupted usage 
under it, are violated, and the sense and conscience of every civilized 
people on the earth set at naught and defied. The sublime thought 
that has filled the bosoms of American patriots, philosophers, and poets, 
and which the millions have ever uttered with rapture, " This, this is the 
land of the free," the Supreme Judicature just now proclaims must be 
surrendered to the doctrine which makes Slavery national, and, in spite 
of the will of the people, opens up all our territories to become the home 
of the slave ! It is this decree, reversing the principles of our revolu- 
tion and the policy of our Government from its foundation, supported 
by the Executive power and and a sectional oligarchy, which has at last 
reached, through many minor controversies, the grand issue on which 
the destiny of the races of this continent depends. To meet it in such 
way as to avert the portended mischiefs, is now the greatest concern of 
this country. It is every man's concern, and this must be my apology 
for offering any suggestions about it. 

In common affairs, men understood Lord Bacon's philosophy long 
before he applied it to the advancement of the sciences. The prudent 
and sagacious constantly look on the past portion of life, to learn from 
its experiments what to pursue and what to avoid. So statesmen, who 
have the welfare of races committed to their care, should look to their his- 
tory to guide in the adoption of systems to promote their prosperity. 
The founders of our Government were wise and good men, and called to 
their aid in forming our institutions the experience of all enlightened na- 
tions, especially that of the mother country and that of their own as colo- 
nies. Without exception, the whole body of sages and patriots embraced 
the Declaration of Independence as lying at the base of our whole polity, 
and held that the liberties of mankind were the surest sources of the 
wealth, power, and happiness, of a community. Slavery — universally 
pronounced the curse of the country, the blot on its fair fame — was only 
tolerated for the time, because time was necessary to effect a cure of 
what was a chronic disease, which hasty and violent remedies would 
aggravate, and might make mortal. It was soon, however, reduced 
from its extended boundaries, and all the country that then belonged 
to the Union, and which its power could reach, was dedicated to Free- 
dom, in the confident hope that its growth under this invigorating power 
would, in the course of years, produce a teeming population — the off- 
spring of free labor — that would, by the overflow of its numbers, 
made prosperous by industry and economy, by degrees remove the Af- 



rican-American race to a more congenial and free home within the 
tropics. This expectation would have heen realized to some extent by 
this time, had not a vast acquisition of territory, already stocked "with 
slaves, been added to the Union. This opened up a way for the dis- 
persion of the multiplying millions in the South, and prevented the mis- 
chief from being felt, of retaining such an overshadowing crowd of slaves, 
to drive out or starve out all the rest of the white race, if even the 
masters were able to hold their places and the negroes in subjection. 

But the policy which has built the tier of free States from the At- 
lantic to the Mississippi will still accomplish its grand design, if the 
patriotism and courage which began this movement remain among us 
to urge it. If all the territory of this continent now free is maintained 
in its freedom, the Slave Power, which received its new impulse from 
the political ambition awakened by extended domain, must rapidly 
shrink under the pressure of the robust strength of free labor, now 
strong within the slave States, as a domestic element of opposition to 
the competition of slaves, and becoming irresistible as a political in- 
fluence beyond their limits, to crush those aspirations of ambitious men, 
who found their schemes of subjecting our popular institutions upon the 
prevalence of the institution of Slavery. I propose therefore to the 
friends of the great cause of popular rights and free labor on this con- 
tinent, to resume the conquering march in its behalf, first indicated by 
Jefferson, defined and established by the ordinance of 1787, by all the 
States in the Congress of the Confederation, and finally sanctioned in 
the Constitution. That line of march terminated on the eastern bank 
of the Mississippi river, because there terminated the territory belong- 
ing to the Union. The voice of the majority in Congress and the nation, 
on the acquisition of that region which opened the way to the Pacific, 
was in favor of its resumption. The effort was defeated by the inter- 
position of 10,000 slaves in Missouri, and the threat to dissolve the 
Union, unless permitted to constitute it a slave State. This was the 
first attempt to defeat the designs of the fathers of the Republic, in 
dedicating its domain, unpolluted by Slavery, to the white race, and 
opening the career to Freedom over the great West beyond the Missis- 
sippi. The desperate struggle for Kansas has resulted more happily. 
There, intrigue, menace, violence, and bloodshed, were all tried in vain 
against the constancy of a brave and patient people, upholding a good 
cause. This triumph over all the bad acts of bad men, abusing govern- 
ment to their sinister aims, will restore Missouri, even its enemies ad- 
mit, as a link in the chain of free States, to girdle the middle of the 
continent from ocean to ocean. It is this grand consummation which is 
to remove, in removing the cause, all the harassing controversies 
threatening disruption between the States distinguished now by white 
and black labor — the one elevating the industrious producer, the other 
degrading the most useful employment by the opprobrium attached to 
the slave. 

Let me linger here, and take a survey of that glorious line of progress 
marked out by the master minds of our early statesmen, and argue from 
the past what are to be the results of that system through which they 
hoped to secure a happy destiny for the various races it embraced at its 



8 

inauguration. Of all tlie regions adapted to foster the energies, intel- 
lectual and physical, of a heroic race of freemen, the world has none 
equal to that which rises from the valley of the Mississippi along the 
temperate central latitudes of this continent, ascends the Rocky Moun- 
tains, where Pike's Peak commands its views, and stands as the stand- 
ard-bearer, beckoning the nation — which descends again, and forms the 
great basin of the continent, the western rim — the Sierra Nevada — 
making the border heights, from which it looks down on California and 
the Pacific ocean. I have trod much of this vast scene — its great plain 
on the east, with its meandering rivers, spreading out lines of forest 
shades amid the illimitable prospect — its mountain grandeur on the 
slopes clothed in luxuriant grass and wild vines, the elevations with 
lofty woods, the crests combing out at some places with rich minerals, 
at others crowned with turrets of rock, the highest, with imperishable 
snow — the parks and valleys between, now the winter homes of the wild 
tribes and their horses, on which they sweep the plains, in their hunts 
and wars, at no distant day to become the birth-place of a nobler and 
a fairer progeny than Circassia can boast, or the Caucasus from which 
it is the pride of our race to have descended. 

It is remarkable that the blessings which Providence has prepared 
on this continent for civilization seem to emerge all of a sudden to the 
view, as the condition of society has reached the point to make appro- 
priation possible. The gold long glistened in the sand and quartz of 
California, under the eyes of the eager, gold-hunting Spaniard, unseen. 
It was reserved to feed the mighty commerce to spring up, when the 
energies of the Anglo-Saxon race on the North American continent had 
tamed its Atlantic wildernesses ; when its inventive genius had found 
the means to leap through space by the steamboat on the sea, and the 
railroad car by land ; to annihilate it as an obstruction to thought, by 
conveying it on the lightning over continents and oceans. The same 
moment seems first to have revealed the immeasurable treasures of the 
great plains and the mountains of the interior, which one colossal nation is 
to bestride, with one foot on each great ocean, sending with its com- 
merce over both the blessings of liberty and civilization. 

It is said that when the Puritan Pilgrims first reached this shore, 
they sent out pioneers to ascertain how far westward the land was sus- 
ceptible of cultivation. They returned with the good tidings that the 
selvage of the continent, for at least twenty miles back, was habitable 
by an agricultural people. This was the utmost aspiration of a people 
who, for religion and liberty, gave what to them was the world, to seat 
themselves on its mere margin. Their prows now plow the waves of 
every ocean, and their children, having redeemed California from the 
atrophy of Spanish rule, are now pressing up the Sacramento, to meet 
in the great basin their brethren of Kansas, who, ascending with their 
settlements the broad streams on which they have conquered and estab- 
lished free homes, are already gathering gold at their fountain heads, in 
Pike's Peak and its southern ranges. Here, then, we see rapidly real- 
izing Benton's prediction, that " the line of great States which now 
' stretch half way across our continent in the same latitudes — Pennsyl- 
•^ vania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri — may be matched by an 



' equal number of States, equally great, betAveen Missouri and Califor- 
' nia." Kansas has thrown off her slave fetters, and is now ready to 
take her place as a free State in the Union. Benton's second State, 
West Kansas, or the State of San Luis, is filling up with people around 
Pike's Peak, and in the rich valley from which it takes its name. Fre- 
mont, Beale, Heap, Gilpin, McClanahan, and Leroux, all familiar with 
this region, speak with enthusiasm of the fertility of its soil and salubri- 
ty of its climate. The San Luis Valley, drained by the Rio del Norte, 
lies between the 38th and 39th parallels of latitude ; it is at once the 
largest and most beautiful of all the mountain parks. The snowy bat- 
tlements of the Sierra San Juan form its western wall, and it is here, 
according to Col. Gilpin, where the Sierra Mimbres rises to the alti- 
tude of perpetual snow, and assumes for two hundred miles the local 
name of the Sierra San Juan, " that the dislocation of nature by vol- 
canic forces, and the consequent metalliferous developments, attain their 
highest culmination." And let me say here, in regard to this gallant 
officer and hardy pioneer, that the language I have quoted from one of his 
recent speeches is no prophecy after the fact. Years ago, before the 
discovery of gold in California or at Pike's Peak, in his tent, and with- 
in sight of the great Sierra San Juan, he uttered the same prediction, 
since verified in a manner so extraordinary. 

The third State marked out by Benton is the Mountain State : " A 
section of the Rocky Mountains, from the 37th to the 41st parallel 
of latitude, nearly three hundred miles north and south, and going 
down to the base on either side, making two hundred miles or more 
in breadth, covering an area of 60,000 square miles, while all the 
Swiss Cantons have not 20,000." This Mountain State will make 
one of an unbroken chain of States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
No other section of the Rocky Mountains is capable of an extent of 
cultivation to embody a community to constitute a State ; but here a 
Republic will grow up, thrice as potent as all the Swiss Cantons. Its 
three immense parks — the South, the Middle, and the North Park — 
two of them thirty miles, the third sixty miles in diameter, contain an 
area of land fit for cultivation greater than all Switzerland, while in- 
numerable valleys, divided by rich, sloping hills, covered to the sum- 
mit with pasturage, open the way from the parks through a multitude 
of streams — northward by the Platte to the Missouri, eastward by the 
Arkansas to the Mississippi, southward by the Rio Grande del Norte 
to the Gulf of Mexico, and southwestwardly by the Colorado to the 
Gulf of California. Here we find four immense rivers of our continent 
lifting their heads aloft together in the midst of the richest mountain 
scene in the world, interlocking with their arms and embracing the re- 
gion of their birth. 

This healthy, luxuriant land, thus separated into coves or parks, is 
distinguished, as Kentucky was when first appropriated by its civilized 
settlers, as a sort of preserve for the game that fed surrounding nations. 
In Fremont's journal of his exploration in 1843-'4, it is thus described. 
He approached by the head stream of the Platte. " The valley nar- 
' rowed (he says) as we ascended, and presently degenerated into a gorge, 
' through which the river passed, as through a gate. We entered, and 



10 

found onrselves in the new park, a beautiful circular valley of tliirty 
' miles diameter, walled in all around with snowy mountains, rich with 
' water and with grass, fringed with pine on the mountain sides below the 
' snow line, and a Paradise for all grazing animals. The Indian name for 
' it signifies ' Cow Lodge,' of which our own may be considered a trans- 
' lation, the enclosure, the grass, the water, and the herds of buifalo roam- 
' ing over it, naturally presenting the idea of a park." The resemblance 
recommended to Fremont the English translation of the Indian name. 
The Indians had never seen an enclosed park, but they knew that it was 
peculiarly the lodge of the game, because the Indian tribes dare not 
lodge there. It was, like Kentucky, the hunting and fighting ground 
of the Indians, but the home of none ; when they came to hunt, they 
came, too, with all their strength, to fight. Fremont had proof of this 
in passing from the New Park on the east of the Rocky Mountains to 
the Old Park to the west of the chain. The journal goes on, after 
passing the narrow divide between the parks : " We found ourselves 
on the western waters ; we halted at noon on the edge of another 
mountain valley called the Old Park, in which is formed Grand river, 
one of the principal branches of the Colorado of California. We were 
now moving with some caution, as, from the trail, we found the Ara- 
pahoe village had moved this way. As we were coming out of their 
enemies' country, and as this was war ground, we were desirous to 
avoid them." While thus guarding himself against an attack from 
the Arapahoes, a band of Utahs was discovered coming from the west 
of the mountains to hunt ; and in the collision which took place between 
these two hostile villages, he was enabled to draw off without molesta- 
tion from either. His notice of the encounter between these marching, 
war-making, and hunting villages, at once shows their estimate of the 
country for which they contended, and the habits which will determine 
their destiny. It is apparent that this Mountain State, which attracts 
the warlike tribes from the great valleys beyond the Rocky Mountains 
and the plains on this side, like Kentucky, which brought the Indians 
from beyond the Ohio on the north and the Cumberland on the 
south, to contend for the prey it afforded, is to be the grandest of all 
the States in the belt, but it must have a band of pioneers that can 
employ the axe and the rifle with equal success. 

A fourth State will embrace the whole valley of the Colorado, down 
to its head of navigation by steam, in latitude 36° 6'. Its width, from 
the base of the Rocky Mountains to the eastern base of the Wahsatch 
Range, is 150 miles ; its length, upward of 300. The Colorado, which 
passes for several degrees of latitude below the heail of navigation 
through a desert, yet opens to this Valley State the whole northwestern 
section of Mexico, with the Gulf of California. A central railroad will 
strike, in the midst of this State, the old Spanish trail from New Mex- 
ico to Los Angeles, in California, which bends up in a loop to 38° of 
latitude in the Colorado Valley, and descends to 34°, to avoid the im- 
passable desert along the lower latitudes. A short branch of railroad 
from the central will unite the navigable waters of the Mississippi Avith 
those of the California Gulf by 1,000 miles of rail, and open up the 
•western flank of Mexico to the control of our interior States. This 



11 

Valley State has already the nucleus upon whicli to build its strength 
in the settlements at Las Vegas de Santa Clara, of several thousand 
white men. The Sierra de la Plata, or Silver Mountains, border the 
valley of the Great Colorado ; the Cerro di Sal (Salt Mountain) is 
situated among the western spurs of the Sierra de la Plata ; and here, 
also, are found mountains of iron, rivalling those of Missouri. 

The Territory of Utah, in the Great Basin, including Carson's Val- 
ley, makes the last of the magnificent belt of States which are to bring 
the seaports of the Atlantic into weekly communication with the com- 
merce of the Pacific by railroad, and hourly intelligence by telegraph. 
In this Territory, it is computed there exists already a white popula- 
tion of 60,000 souls. There are a multitude of thriving towns, extend- 
ing from Parowan and Cedar City to the City of the Salt Lake. Ag- 
riculture flourishes, coal mines are opened, iron works are established, 
mechanic arts are plied, and busy trade is pushing industry ahead to 
every point of the compass. Before five years shall have elapsed, 
Bentoii's prediction, received a few years ago with such incredulity, will 
1)0 accomplished. Kansas on the east, Utah on the west, have already 
sufficient numbers to become States. The next season will not come 
and go without witnessing a larger population in the State of San Luis, 
or Colona, as some prefer to call it, attracted by the treasures lately 
revealed under the shadow of Pike's Peak, than is now possessed by 
Utah and Kansas together. The Mountain State and the upper valley 
of the great Colorado will soon be filled with a teeming and busy peo- 
ple ; their attractions surpass all the others, and in their gorges will be 
sought and found the golden quartz whose washings have impregnated 
the sands of the plains below. 

This belt of States, now in rapid growth, will have decisive influence 
on the destiny of our grand Republic, and all the dependencies of this 
continent. When their political, agricultural, manufacturing, and 
commercial interests, are blended by the all-pervading power of elec- 
tricity and steam, a bond of union becomes consolidated, strong in pro- 
portion to the magnitude of the system within the reach of its attrac- 
tion. All Mexico will be subject absolutely to the influence it may 
exert, whether for its prosperity or ruin. That base line which can 
bring the whole force of the Union to bear upon its most exposed part 
in an instant, must necessarily control its destiny. That this power 
will be exerted for its protection, and to promote its welfare, will be the 
natural result of the closer and more commanding affinities which must 
grow up out of our commercial interests in that country, and which, 
requiring a stable, just, and free Government, to create the prosperity 
necessary to advance them, will concentrate an irresistible power on 
our Government to secure it. 

The most important of all political questions with the friends of our 
Union now arises, as to the means of developing this cordon of central 
States at the earliest day. Prudent statesmen of this time avail them- 
selves of the advantage of consulting that policy which those who built 
up the highest prosperity in our older States adopted under similar cir- 
cumstances, and always incline to apply it to the new, if it have suc- 
cessful experiment for its sanction. A line of free States, with a 



12 

magnificent national road — like the great Aorta in our system, scatter- 
ing the currents of life throughout the body — was the means applied by 
the founders of the grandeur of the Republic to fill up the uncultivated 
regions between the seaboard and the great West with a race of our 
own blood. I propose the same process for our greater West, not 
merely for the advantage of the people who are to fill the new-born 
States with civilization and improvement, and all the blessings that 
attend Freedom wherever it goes, but for the resulting benefits it will 
confer also on our seaboard States on both the great oceans. The 
discoveries of late years render the creation of means to transport a 
population across the continent an easy effort, compared with that which 
paved the way for the emigration that has in a life-time filled up the 
territory between the Alleghany and Mississippi, and an equal dis- 
tance beyond. The new power that is said to have bridged the Atlan- 
tic adds half a million annually to the free laborers seeking homes 
among us ; and the teeming West now adds its multitudes to those of 
their enterprising kindred from the older States, in peopling the lands 
beyond the Mississippi. Railroads and steamboats bear them to its 
confines. The dense and matted forest, so formidable to the settlers 
east of the Mississippi, do not retard the march of those who are press- 
ing beyond to the shores of the Pacific, but a land inviting the plow, 
and already clothed with meadow, as if the Almighty had prepared here 
a new land of promise, to repay the trials of those who had passed the 
wilderness — a land lifted up into the pure air, above the malaria, from 
which disease is banished, and whose dry atmosphere ripens the already 
planted meadow, and converts the grass into hay, as it stands upon the 
ground, to fatten and sustain countless myriads of buffaloes throughout 
the winter, instead of rotting, like the rank grass in the humid climates 
of the delta of the Mississippi, and on this side, and infecting the air 
with disease and death ; and when to these rare recommendations is 
added that temptation which none can resist, that shining metal which 
commands the world, awaits here the coming of our race to found an 
empire, the greatest on the earth and amidst its grandest scenes. 

This column of new States, which are to be pushed to the Pacific, 
may with truth be said to accomplish what Columbus in his rapture 
supposed he had attained when the vast Western Continent rose upon 
his vision. He looked to the shore as that of the " far Cathay; " he 
thought he had reached the East Indian Empire by sailing to the west. 
A railroad across the continent, now that the steamboat plows both 
oceans, will bring China nearer to Europe than America was in the 
days of Columbus, and both Europe and Asia may meet in their pro- 
ducts in the heart of our continent, in less time than our own products 
could formerly be conveyed to its centre from its two sea- shores. It is 
now perceived that the steam-car is superseding water carriage to a 
great extent, by its rapidity und security in conveying traffic as well as 
travellers. Hoav much of the Oriental commerce of Europe, that 
now rolls on for a good part of a year, circling the hemispheres, will 
be content to continue this lagging delay, rather than to reach fruition 
in a few months by a quick transit across our continent 1 The nations, 
awakened by the electric spark of modern discovery, find the Old World 



13 

delay between tliought and consummation too slow, and now, after cen- 
turies of consideration, Europe is resolved suddenly to make a short 
cut to India by the Isthmus of Suez. America may outstrip Europe 
in this race for the riches of the Eastern continent and the islands of 
the Eastern seas. A flight to and across the Pacific, on the wings of 
steam, will attain the prize soonest. 

The suggestion of the impossibility of this achievement is worthy of 
those sages who, after seeing the steamboat stem our rapid and crooked 
rivers, and ply along the ocean around its shores, where it is most dan- 
gerous, held back for years its adventure across the Atlantic by the 
din of impossibility ! So now the impossibility of making a railroad 
over the smooth plains and long sloping mountains, over which the 
wagons of the emigrant, loaded with women and children, have been 
moving over buffalo roads, for which nothing has been done by science 
and art, is urged to bar the application of those facilities which have 
climbed the steeps of the Alleghanies with winding grades, and bored 
through their inaccessible heights with tunnels. Col. Fremont's last 
scientific survey of the route from the Missouri to the Pacific, in which 
he traversed all its mountain passes, divided into sections, giving the 
grade of each with exact measurement, proves conclusively its practi- 
cability. His measurements, taken with perfect instruments, in the 
hands of an expert, disclose to us that, for the first 250 miles on the 
Kansas river, the track ascends two and three-fourths feet to the mile. 
At an elevation of 1,350 feet above the sea, the route left the Kansas 
to cross the prairie uplands between it and the Arkansas. It reached 
the Arkansas at the distance of 150 miles, the elevation being 2,676 
feet above the sea, and the rise being nine feet to the mile for the whole 
distance, and, in crossing the uplands, varying from twent}^ to fortj' feet. 
Up the Kansas to the mouth of the Huerfano, the distance is 230 miles — 
the ascent, seven feet to the mile for the first 140 miles, and thence, 
to the mouth of the Huerfano, ten feet to the mile. This point is 
4,375 feet above the sea. At the head of the Huerfano, in the Wet 
Mountains, it is 9,000. From the mouth of the river to one of its 
springs at the foot of Utah Pass, in the Wet Mountains, the distance is 
124 miles, the average grade being thirty-six feet to the mile. From 
the Utah Pass to that of the Cochetope is little over 100 miles. Fol- 
lowing the mountain foot around to the head of the San Luis Valley, at 
an elevation of 7,600 feet, makes the approach to the Cochetope Pass, 
in the main Rocky Mountain range, through the Sahwatch River Val- 
ley. From the San Luis Valley to the Cochetope Pass, at an elevation 
of 9,820 feet, the distance is 40 miles, and the average grade fifty-five 
feet. At the Utah Pass, a tunnel of 1,000 yards through the crest of 
the ridge is required ; and at the Cochetope Pass, when the crest is 
attained by a grade of fifty-five feet to the mile, a tunnel of 2,000 yards 
will be required, which would carry the line to a corresponding eleva- 
tion on the western side of the mountain, 350 feet below the summit. 

Here is the development of all the difficulties which a railroad would 
have to surmount in the passage of the Rocky Mountains, the whole 
way between the 38th and 39th parallels of latitude, wooded and 
watered with the exception of the short prairie line between the Kansas 



14 

and Arkansas rivers, and from end to end, the soil rich in grasses and 
capable of settlement. Fremont has taken pains, not only to measure 
the route and present every difficulty, but, in his forthcoming publica- 
tion, he will exhibit to the eye of the reader every feature of the defiles 
taken by daguerreotype, so that an engineer in his closet may see the 
impediments in the same daylight in which Fremont saw them. He will 
give his measurements and the whole aspect of the mountain country, 
to test the verity of the statement of his letter to me, and which I read 
in the House of Representatives, with his pledge to make it good, that 
" the line is direct, and the inclination easy ; the heavier grades 
' together and continuous, none heavy enough to make the snow an 
' impediment upon the rails ; that there are but two great obstructions, 
' easily overcome by moderate tunnelling, and lesser grades than are 
' now in use in England, over which is passing the largest traffic in the 
' world." Compare this with the grades over the Alleghany Moun- 
tains, penetrated and passed over by so many railroads bearing im- 
mense trains of burden as well as passenger cars. The railroad from 
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh passes with a grade of ninety-one feet to the 
mile for eleven miles, and with 800 feet of tunnel. The Baltimore and 
Ohio railroad ascends the Alleghany from Piedmont to Altamont on a 
grade of more than one hundred feet to the mile for 17 miles, and 
through several tunnels at other places in the mountains, making a dis- 
tance underground of more than a mile ; and on the railroad from Bos- 
ton to Troy, to get rid of a circuit and heavy grade, the Hoosac tun- 
nel, four and a half miles in length, is in progress. 

The Sierra Nevada, which is the only obstacle beyond the Great 
Basin, has been found practicable. Mr. J. Lewis, an engineer of great 
eminence, who surveyed the route for a road from Charleston to Cin- 
cinnati, and recently from San Francisco to San Jose, gives information 
that Sherman Day has made the location of a wagon road from the 
vicinity of Placerville to Cary's Mill, in Carson Valley, crossing the 
Sierra at Johnson's Pass. No part of this road has an ascent over five 
degrees. The engineer traces it at every step up the South Fork of the 
American river to Slippery Ford, which is only four miles from Lake 
Valley ; and a tunnel of four miles from this point, he positively as- 
serts, is the only serious difficulty in the construction of the railroad. 
He states that two hundred feet rise in the length of the tunnel of four 
miles (fifty feet to the mile) attains the Lake Valley, and that the 
descent from the Lake Valley is so entirely within the limits of railroad 
gradients that he entertains no doubt of a practicable route. 

Here we see, from the reports of practical railroad engineers, and 
actual travel over the routes, that the Great Basin is accessible from 
the east through the Cochetope Pass in the Rocky Mountains, and 
from the west through the Sierra Nevada, by way of Sherman Day's 
Pass at Lake Valley, and that both of these passes lie between the 38th 
and 39th parallels of latitude, and thus a direct route through the centre 
of the domain of the Republic is presented. 

Successful art always pursues nature in the attempt to accomplish 
similar designs. When we look on the map, and see the central river 
of the continent running from north to south in the midst of its great 



15 

valley, and its thousand tributaries spreading out east and west ; and 
when we see art, with innumerable contrivances, distributing the pro- 
ducts of the soil to and from the central channel, the reasoning mind 
infers that a wise Providence so arranged the grand instrumentalities 
of nature, that the sagacity and industry of man might apply them ben- 
eficially, as we see them employed. If, then, we would convert other 
great agencies of nature to the similar design of making a channel of 
communication from ocean to ocean — a steam river across the continent 
to a direct and close connection between the eastern and western waters 
of the world, with a view to make lateral distribution of the commerce 
of life through the body of our country — if we would follow nature, the 
main channel should take its way along the central region, and throw 
out its branches north and south. The structure of the human frame 
teaches that safety and utility are combined in giving a central position 
to the main vital current that animates the system. The great arteries 
do not lie upon the surface, nor do we 

" Wear our hearts upon tlie sleeve, 
For daws to peck at." 

While, then, it may be well to have channels along our frontiers, to 
have commerce with other nations, certainly for national convenience, 
but indispensably for safety from external aggression, it is wise to have 
the main commanding one, where all our energies may be concentrated 
within, so as to be exerted most readily by the national will. 

The effect of such a thoroughfare in filling the interior with populous 
States is obvious to every man of reflection. Pigeons, that gather in 
such clouds, and spread on rapid wing over a country fruitful in mast, 
have not an instinct surer or stronger than that of men for regions that will 
feed all their appetites and the longings of their hearts. Allured by the 
gold that runs in veins through all the mountain ranges, by the riches that 
rise up spontaneously with the grasses that even now cover the uncul- 
tivated plains with animal life — the means of easy access being supplied, 
they will flock to farm, to mine, to hunt, and revel in adventure. The 
attractions of a farmer's life in regions where the land lies open to the 
plow ; where the air is so wholesome that game hung up in the heat of 
summer is embalmed and dried ; where the lungs heal in consumptive 
patients, who now seek the pure, dry, and thin air of these elevated re- 
gions for a cure, instead of the damp rotting vapors of the tropics — 
would bring multitudes to cultivate the voids which have hitherto known 
nothing but barbarism. Thousands would go there from the love of 
romantic adventure and enterprise, and all that the energy and intelli- 
gence of our race could draw from the treasures of those primeval re- 
gions, from their minerals, animals, woods, waters, and various soils, 
would be poured down toward both seaboards to swell the tide of com- 
merce ; and this, so far from depopulating the older States washed by 
the ocean, would impart new life to them. The wants of a vast inte- 
rior, made up of races accustomed to enjoy all that belongs to the sea — 
its luxuries from all its continental shores and islands — its commodities 
and elegances derived from all the arts and manufactures which have 
grown to perfection in the older States — would create a demand on their 
industry and skill which would attract to them, from all parts of Eu- 



16 

rope, the labor necessary to make adequate supply, and give an impulse 
to native genius and enterprise never felt before. What a spring this 
would impart to commerce, to ship-building, to coal-mining, and to the 
iron foundry, Avhich creates the framework, the bone and sinew of every 
potent structure that belongs to commerce, manufactures, the mechanic 
arts, and agriculture. 

The influence of this grand movement, emerging in a line of free 
States with almost marvellous birth, between Missouri and California, 
upon the destiny of the races upon this continent, is the aspect that in- 
vites the deepest consideration. The immediate result will be to repress 
far to the north and south the wild beasts, and the wild tribes of men 
who pursue them. Settlements of husbandmen will soon fill up the 
middle region, watered by the Arkansas, the Kansas, the Platte, and 
their tributaries, and the empty spaces now marked on the map as the 
hunting grounds of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Utahs, and Sioux, and 
the reservations of the Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokecs^ will be- 
come the abode of civilized communities. The wild Indians will pur- 
sue the buifalo into the sections, north and south, least adapted to cul- 
tivation, and, as the game gradually diminishes, the tribes supported by 
it will destroy each other for the remnants. This has been the fate of 
all the hunting tribes of this continent, as agriculture intruded into the 
domain on which they preyed. There is some reason to hope that the 
vast extent of the Western plains peculiarly adapted to pastoral life 
may have the effect to convert portions of the savage hunting tribes into 
useful accessories of our race, as the occupants of tlie soil, each sub- 
serving the interest of the other. The Indians connected with Spanish 
settlements south of our territories become herdsmen, and obtain thus 
a more comfortable and much less precarious subsistence from the do- 
mesticated flocks and herds they protect, than formerly from those they 
pursued for indiscriminate destruction. The Northern tribes of our 
country are so addicted to wandering, by nature so incapable of steady 
habits of labor, that those that survive the destruction of the game must 
become a nomadic people, and live on a share of the herds they tend for 
the settlers, or in sections remote from agricultural improvement be- 
come, like the nomadic tribes of Asia, masters of herds, and roam from 
wilderness to wilderness for subsistence. As for the tribes that now 
have homes on the frontiers of the Western States, the late sales of 
their reservations in Kansas, with their consent, and on account of the 
Indian proprietors, point to the destiny of all similarly situated. 

The Indian cultivation is nothing, except in the tribes where the 
chiefs and a few head men have appropriated to themselves the Govern- 
ment annuities designed for their people, and, purchasing slaves with the 
wealth thus acquired, have made them work portions of the richest soil, 
and by the products doled out to the poor of the tribe have reduced them 
all to vassalage. The attempt of Ridge, Boudinot, and others of the 
Cherokees, to assert the rights of the mass of the people, was met by 
assassination on the part of those who had monopolized the money and 
power of the nation. The suggestion of Mr. Buchanan, in his message 
to Congress, that this Indian usurpation should be adopted as a State 
in the Union, coincided in principle with his recommendation of the 



17 

Lecompton usurpation for adoption as a State Government in virtue of 
the Slavery clause in the Constitution it presented. The latter had a 
redeeming proviso connected with it, to which the Indian State pro- 
posed for fellowship with the other States cannot pretend. After 
seven years of endurance, the people of Kansas could have changed 
their Constitution, and partially enfranchised the State. The Indian 
State, which must come for admission if the President's innovation 
succeed, is constituted of the red and black races exclusively ; and 
the political power is vested in the chiefs of the former, in virtue of the 
influence derived from their ownership of the latter ; so that the caste 
with which rests the authority will, for its own sake, perpetuate Slavery. 
It is not probable that the white race, which constitutes the sovereign- 
ties which comprise the United States, will bear an amalgamation in 
Congress by the admission of red or black representatives, (for they mix 
in the Indian Government,) any more than they would admit such rep- 
resentatives in the State Governments, or approve such motley inter- 
mixture in domestic life. The novelty of introducing Cherokees, Sacs 
and Foxes, Pottawatomies, and Kickapoos, into our Senate and House 
of Representatives, (and of the other tribes ; for if one comes, why not 
all 1) can have been proposed by the President only as a " sop for Cer- 
berus," that triple-headed monster, which he fancies will guard the 
gates of the Charleston Convention through which our Pluto must go to 
renew his reign. No one more misconceived the genius and temper of 
the people to whom Mr. Buchanan tenders this offering than he. They 
are proud of an oligarchy of their own best blood, but to share it with 
an Indian, although he brought the honors of Slavery in his train, they 
would spurn. 

Hybrid races carry degradation alike into government as into commu- 
nities. Indeed, they cannot perpetuate themselves. The Moors and 
Spaniards, although subsisting together in the same peninsula for eight 
centuries, and intermingling in every relation, have propagated no com- 
mon stock. The celebrated African explorer. Dr. Livingstone, as re- 
markable for his observation as for his truth and liberal feeling, states 
that in the old settlement of Angola, where the Portuguese, the first col- 
onizers of Africa, amalgamated universally with the natives, the hybrid 
race does not survive but a few generations in its own line. Such fam- 
ilies run out, unless they lapse into the African, and lose their caste 
entirely by the infusion of negro blood. So in this country, the French 
who have intermarried freely with the Indians leave a posterity called 
half-breeds, because they do not survive an intermixture of their caste 
beyond two or three generations. Curious observers have assured me 
that the same fact is true of the mulatto caste ; where the line is con- 
fined to this color for a few generations, it fails. The attempt, then, to 
hybridize our Government — which, I trust, is to survive a thousand cen- 
turies — must prove a failure in the end, even should Mr. Buchanan's 
scheme of amalgamation have a beginning ; but that it will not have. The 
semi-civilized tribes on our Western frontier will sell out their lands, 
and subside at length among their kindred races of Mexico, where it is 
to be hoped, under the protection and countenance of our Government. 
they will in the course of time become a refined and polished nation. 
2 



18 

and revive -witli their growing prosperity some of the elegant tastes that 
distinguished them as a people in the days of Montezuma, superadded 
to the manly energy of mind and body which Liberty invariably confers. 
This, I confidently believe, will be the consequence of filling up the 
great West with these pale-faces that have already wrought such mir- 
acles since their appearance at Plymouth and Jamestown. 

But they have another most noble achievement before them — most 
noble — because it requires that lofty magnanimity which can triumph 
over the strongest, high aspiring, and boldest impulses of a gallant na- 
ture, pressing forward in a wrong direction, and daring to encountei 
obstacles irremovable because planted by nature in the heart — in the 
heart of those who assail as well as those who defend. Justice and 
conscience form an insuperable bar to the propagation of Slavery, and 
the wrong inherent in the institution undermines it. If the deliverance 
is timely, and the work of the superior race, it shows that it is progres- 
sive, and looking to higher destinies for the master and the slave. If 
delayed until engrafted on the political institutions and grounded in 
the habits of a people, it fastens a decadence upon both, and the rise 
of the inferior classes, in combination, brings deliverance and ruin to- 
gether. The Roman Republic sunk under servile and civil wars, in 
which the slaves and gladiators were associated with the legions. The 
decline and fall of the Roman Empire was the result of the universal 
corruption which universal Slavery entailed. In modern Europe, the 
progress of the superior class was marked by the extinction of villenage 
and the enfranchisement of the serfs. The growth of civilization in 
Russia, and the marked fact that her millions of serfs could not defend 
her own soil from a few thousand embattled Britons and Frenchmen, 
has hastened emancipation across the north of all Europe and Asia. 
The words of the Emperor to his nobility in Moscow, who hesitated in 
this great work, are full of profound admonition. I utter them here, 
not as prophetic, but evincing that sound sense which I know will con- 
trol in the solution of Slavery in our land : 

" Gentlemen, I am always happy at being able to address thanks to 
' the nobility ; but it is not in my nature to speak against my con- 
' science. I always speak the truth, and, to my great regret, I this 
' day cannot thank you. You may remember two years ago, in this 
^ hall, I spoke to you of the necessity of proceeding sooner or later to 
' the reform of those laws which regulate servitude — a reform that must 
' come from above, that it may not come from below. My words have 
' been ill-understood. Since then, this reform has been the object of 
' my constant solicitude ; and having invoked the Divine blessing on my 
' undertaking, I have commenced the work. * * * i have fixed 
' for you the bases of the reform, and I shall never swerve from them. 
' ' Reform must come from above, that it may not come from below.' " 

A more potent voice than even that of the Autocrat has proclaimed 
this as the law of the world ; and Turkey, all-conquering once, stands 
a sad spectacle, exhibiting, in her own decay, how the wrong inflicted 
on inferior races avenges itself by the vices with which it afflicts the 
"wrong- doer. 

Slavery in our country has taken its worst form, and will be followed 



19 

by the worst results, if not speedily removed. The contrast between 
the races destroys the sympathies of kindred which would soften servi- 
tude. It has obtained the highest judicial sanction for the idea that 
the negro is a being so alien to our nature as to have no rights which 
we are bound to respect as appertaining to man ; that he is not inclu- 
ded as such in the great declaration of the rights of humanity ; and the 
inference is, that he has no soul. Our Supreme Court has decided that 
the negro has nothing of that "Divinity that stirs within us," which 
can save him here or hereafter. This monstrous doctrine, interpolated 
into our Constitution, is a last resort to render Slavery compatible with 
the principles of our free government. This shocking decision will 
awaken a feeling in every heart not dead to all the sentiments of hu- 
manity, that cannot but arouse public opinion everywhere to revolt. 
To what grade must the population of the slaveholding States be re- 
duced, if that class which performs the labor and creates the wealth of 
the State is stripped of the attributes of man, and ceases to have any 
rights 1 Will not such degradation attach in time to all who are con- 
strained to labor in the service of another, no matter of what class, or how 
compelled ? If, then, a state of things is produced in the slaveholding 
States which subjects the white laborer to the same absolute depend- 
ence on the employer as the black, the fate of one becomes the fate of 
the other, and neither will have rights which those holding all power in 
the State are bound to respect. A leading press in Virginia has al- 
ready announced this doctrine, and a late debate in the Legislature of 
Georgia evinced that this squinting toward despotism was understood 
to be the aim of those striving to reduce all who labor to the condition 
of Slavery, by opening the slave trade to fill all the channels of industry 
with such as would work for slave wages, or, in other words, for bare 
subsistence. The proposal tending to open the slave trade by legisla- 
tive action was defeated, after strenuous debate, by the argument that 
the slaves now increased faster than the whites ; and that if an addition- 
al influx of Africans, by opening the slave trade, were permitted, the 
wages of free labor would be so reduced as to destroy its existence. 
This admitted argument admits, also, that as the slaves multiply more 
rapidly than the whites, time will produce the same result without im- 
portation. Already, in South Carolina, the slaves are nearly two to 
one of the whites ; and to this complexion all must come at last, in those 
States that foster the slave institution. 

It is evident, from the showing of the census, that free and slave 
labor cannot subsist together through a long tract of time. Virginia 
presents the most favorable aspect for the continuation of both, for it 
is a State that exports the black laborer, and has a climate peculiarly 
inviting to the immigration of free labor ; yet the whole number of 
free whites engaged in agriculture in 1850 was 97,454, while her slaves 
amounted to 472,528 — near half a million — now, doubtless, more. 
And what has been the result of a half century's experiment of black 
and white labor together upon the latter and upon the State's prosperi- 
ty'? A comparison with a free-labor State will show. Virginia, with 
the advantages of soil, climate, extent, and more than double the pop- 
ulation of New York in 1800, has now fallen far behind her rival. In 



20 

1850, the population of New York more than doubled that of Virginia, 
and the census of her real and personal property was triple. This half 
century's experiment, then, solves the problem as to what must be the 
result of free and slave labor on the destiny of States. The energetic 
white generations of Virginia abandon the State to escape from the 
blighting presence of Slavery. The immigration of free labor, and the 
capital it would bring with it, shuns the State, from the same impulse; 
and now, unless reaction occurs to arrest this fatal tendency, is not the 
once leading State of the Union doomed to perpetual inferiority by sub- 
stituting the black race for its own fair and noble progeny ? Had Vir- 
ginia, like New York, gradually abolished Slavery, and thus opened its 
gates to free immigration, and retained her own children, who were 
driven out and disfranchised lest their votes would unsettle the divine 
institution of Slavery, (as it is now called,) who can doubt but that its 
greater white basis at the start would still have kept ahead of that of 
the Northern State 1 If this be so, then for half a million of slaves 
Virginia has exchanged more .than two millions of citizens animated 
with her own blood, gallant spirit, and lofty intellect. The vaunted 
opinion of the Supreme Court, which converts slaves into brutes, makes 
no amends for this loss. With her two millions of free men, Virginia 
has lost $600,000,000 of real and personal property, the difference be- 
tween the assessed value of hers and that in New York ; counted as 
chattels, and not men, slaves make no compensation to Virginia for the 
loss of her free-born children — the priceless jewels of a great Common- 
wealth. 

Neither the heroic nor the Christian spirit, native to the Southern 
bosom, can, in silent thought, brook the sad sophistry of the bench, nor 
the false glosses of sectional conventions, disguising the fatal influence 
of black bondage. They see and feel the ruin around them in the 
poverty and despair of their unemployed countrymen and in the wasted 
face of the country. They know that mischief must fall on their pos- 
terity, when the land is surcharged with hosts of slaves wielding the 
physical energy of the country, and an oppressed white race, which may 
at some time turn the hatred now nurtured against the instruments 
which deprive them of their bread, to those whose opulence and power ia 
founded on the subjection of both subordinate classes. The growing 
evil is marked by the far-seeing forecaste of the oligarchy, not only on 
the census tables, but in the atmosphere that sighs around them. But 
they meet it in the spirit of daring men — political ambition whispers, 
and as from the beginning, its inaudible breathing swells the bosom of 
the proud and aspiring with the thought — "Evil, be thou my good." 
This malady of the South is now to be cured, the chevaliers think, by 
the sword. Its first movement was by combination and diplomacy to 
make Presidents, prostitute aspirants at the North, break compacts, 
seize Kansas, make a black line across the continent, and spread the 
contagion of Slavery over all the south of the continent and its islands, 
and make an Occidental Empire, in imitation of the Oriental Empires of 
Timour and Mohammed. Success seemed to answer to the first well- 
directed push, but Kansas at last proved a stumbling-block, and now 
schemes of direct and immediate aggression, under Executive auspices, 



21 

with arms, are meditated. The shades of Cortez and Pizarro visit in 
dreams the couches of numberless military chieftains with the spoils of 
Mexico, South America, and Cuba, in their hands; and Satrapies, with 
crowds of vassals held of some victorious conqueror, rise in visions to 
put our plain confederated Republic of free citizens to shame. 

But this age, unhappily for all military meteors, is utilitarian. The 
sober minds of our countrymen see no advantage in ravaging Mexico or 
Cuba; nor do they think Slavery such a blessing that they should incur 
the disgrace of buccaneering to bring a free people under the yoke. It 
is against the genius of our Republic, born of Freedom and Toleration, 
to provoke by flagrant wrong, and especially by a wrong having a still 
greater one for its purpose, the establishment of Slavery in a neighbor- 
ing Republic, which fought bravely and successfully to abolish it. This 
scheme for alleviating our plague, by visiting it upon another people, is 
not just, nor will it succeed. 

There is another remedy, deriving its force from the nature of our 
Constitution. It is, indeed, its healing principle, curing wounds other- 
wise irremediable. It is Freedom. It is the deliverance of two incon- 
gruous races from an unnatural connection, and setting both free. That 
sable race, bred in the pestilence of Africa, is a blot on the fair pros- 
pect of our country. The institution which grows up out of its servi- 
tude is a poisonous excrescence, which sucks the vitality out of those to 
whom it clings. It is an institution which, in making the aliment of 
the whole society in which it exists depend on the growth of Slavery, 
makes this at last the lot of all who are not the masters. 

Deliverance therefore from a people who cannot assimilate with our 
people, the subjects of an institution utterly abhorrent to our free in- 
stitutions, is the natural and easy mode of restoring symmetry to our 
political systems, and equality among the people and States of the 
Union. 

How happily might the genius and generous enthusiasm of the lead- 
ing spirits of the South, accomplish this grand result, if the patriotism 
which lies at the bottom of their hearts could hold in check their heady 
ambition 1 Even the soaring flight which would carry the flag of this 
'country over all the surrounding islands of the Gulf and nations of our 
continent, might prove fortunate, if in the fullness of our strength we 
carried along with it the wisdom, justice, freedom, and love of liberty, 
that first unfurled it. But no ! buccaneering abroad — threats, violence, 
and sinister intrigue, at home — are the auspices under which these vast 
designs are inaugurated. 

" for a Falconer's voice 
To lure these tassel gentles back again, 
But bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud." 

If there is no commanding voice to bring these high-flyers back again 
to the just, wise, and peaceful policy that once characterized our Gov- 
ernment, if the two races of the impoverished whites and enslaved 
blacks, with mutual hate, subject each other to a common oppression, 
and " dare not speak aloud," the first heavy calamity that comes from 
either the perverted ambition that would usurp power over the weaker 
nations around us, or the weaker class among us, will awaken a new 



22 

sense of patriotism. The counsels of Washington, Jefferson, Macon, 
and Gaston, of Lowndes, the elder Gadsden of the Revolution, Craw- 
ford, and all the lights of the South, that led the way to homogeneous 
institutions to make our Union perpetual, will again prevail, and Mr. 
Calhoun's sectionalism will abate its presumption. The patriotism of 
the South will then scan the cause of the growth of the North, and will 
gradually open the way to that prime element of its prosperity — Free 
Labor. The reform will be gradual, as all mighty movements, to be 
safe, must be slow. Whenever a region is acquired within our tropics 
to make a permanent home for our American freedmen, emancipation 
will take place rapidly all along the line of slave States bordering on 
the free. Our slaves might even be allowed to make compositions with 
their masters, and work out their own freedom, in the rich countries of 
the tropics, where the labor of a man adapted to the climate is worth 
four times as much as in Virginia or Kentucky. And, whether this be 
done or not, I am satisfied that if such a refuge is provided for the 
blacks, and the argument that emancipation will place them on an 
equality, within the States, with the laboring white man, is thus taken 
out of the mouths of the supporters of the institution, the same class of 
men, whose prejudices, aroused by the fact that they have been injured 
by the competition of slave labor, has been made the means to per- 
petuate the slavery of the instruments of their ruin, will in turn de- 
mand that the slave shall be removed — they will vote his emancipation 
when they know that emancipation includes removal from the State. 

It is only by the joint action of the State and National Governments 
that emancipation can be effected. President Monroe, an eminently 
practical statesman, gave this as his opinion in the Virginia Convention 
in 1829, and when it was suggested that the National Government 
could not interfere in this delicate matter, he declared that it could do 
so in aid of the State Governments, and that emancipation was not 
practicable without such aid. " And," he says, " if we find that this 
evil (Slavery) has preyed upon the vitals of the Union, and has been 
prejudicial to all the States where it has existed, and is likewise re- 
pugnant to their several State Constitutions and Bills of Right, Avhy 
may we not expect that they will unite with us in accomplishing its 
removal? " The Indians have been removed from the diiferent States 
at the expense of the General Government, and new homes provided for 
them ; and as there are free negroes in every one of the States, and the 
subject is thus brought home to the people of all, what is to prevent 
the Federal Government from ofiering to all of that class, who are wil- 
ling to accept it, a home in a climate congenial to their natures, and 
throwing around them its protection, as has been done for the Indians 1 
I do not propose that any man should be constrained to go there, but 
that we should offer them the inducement to go, precisely as we do 
with the people of our own race, when we acquire for them regions like 
California, in which they can better their condition. Without further 
action on the part of our Government than to secure homesteads to 
those who are now free, or may hereafter become so, either by the act 
of the State Government or individuals, and the guaranty of their civil 
and political rights, (as England has done for her subjects in portions 



23 

of Honduras,) emigrants In thousands would soon find their way to 
freedom — to the rich soil, where the people of their own color prevail, 
although just emerging from Slavery, over the Spanish and aboriginal 
race, making the main strength of the country, and holding office both 
in church and state. Can any doubt that the American-born and 
American-instructed African, carrying with him the intelligence, the 
industry, the progressive impulse, acquired by all engaged in the agri- 
culture of this country, would fail to carry success with them to their 
new abodes 1 It imparts new energy to a plant, to transplant it in a 
better and more congenial soil. By the gradual transfer of four mil- 
lions of our freedmen to the vacant regions of Central and South Amer- 
ica ; invigorated by a fresh sense of liberty ; with lands of their own be- 
fore them to improve ; with immense foi'ests of mahogany and all the 
precious woods of the tropics, the dye stuffs, the medicinal plants, and 
varieties of fruits, which make up of themselves a rich commerce, 
growing spontaneously, and to be had simply for the labor of prepara- 
tion ; with mines of silver and gold shut up simply because of the ex- 
haustion of the race that opened them — a race unsuited to the climate 
in which they are found — who can doubt that the transplantation of the 
negro from our temperate zone to that hot climate, that infuses immense 
vigor into all the animal life as well as vegetable growth that is native 
to it, would not only create wealth, but establish a great national power, 
for the benefit of that under the patronage and protection of which it 
arose 1 

All the Spanish States of this continent have, in their new organiza- 
tion, made our Government their exemplar. The relics of despotism 
inherent in their old forms, and possibly the inveterate habit of that 
people, will not permit them to settle, and the machinery to move easily 
and in order. A dependency of our Government, composed of a people 
addicted to respect it, and accustomed to its forms, aided by a multi- 
tude of our own race, whose enterprise and interest would induce them 
to embark their capital and skill in building up a new power to appro- 
priate the riches of the tropics, would form a Republic to give law to 
all of their caste within the reach of its influence. I have no doubt 
that all the nations and islands of the Gulf would fall under the in- 
fluence and make a league with such a dependency of the United States 
as I have contemplated, and that the whole would necessarily look to 
our Union for protection. The contiguity of the United States, and the 
relations which its commerce and overshadowing power would create, 
and the very posture of the country, enveloped in the waters poured 
out from our land and the Gulf stream that washes our shores, must 
make the people who inhabit it with us, though not of us. It would, 
in fact, become our India, but under happier auspices ; for, instead of 
being governed by a great company, to drive the people to despair and 
insurrection by its exactions, it would have its own Government, which 
would owe a fealty to ours, as Canada does to England, which is gov- 
erned by its own representative Assemblies and by a Governor and 
Cabinet, which, however appointed, recognise conformity to public 
opinion declared by the representative body to be a duty. The Crown is 
but a symbol of authority. Its power and that of the British Parlia- 



24 

ment is felt only in aiding the improvement of the country and protect- 
ing it. The tie between them is a triple cord of increased power, hap- 
piness, and glory, the growth of their union. And I believe such will 
be the bond to bind to the car of our Union as dependencies the free 
Republics of African Americans now in embryo in our tropics, and 
the Indian Republics of Mexico, in which the red race now constitutes 
seven-eighths of the population. 

It is the true mission of a superior and enlightened race to protect 
and establish with well-founded institutions the feebler races within the 
reach of its influence. The general welfare requires this, and renders 
it the exalted duty of powerful nations. England, France, and Rus- 
sia, though subject to selfish monarchies, yet feel the impulse of this 
enlightened age; and we see the Czar giving freedom and personal 
rights to his sixty millions of serfs, and spreading civilization over all 
the north of Europe and Asia. England and France hold up besotted 
Turkey, and endeavor to instil life again by imparting freedom and 
toleration to the masses. England extends her principles of representa- 
tive government, in greater or less degree, to her dependencies ; and 
France, propagating her power in Africa and Asia, carries with it the 
refinement, intelligence, and skill, which may at some time elevate the 
people she civilizes in the scale of nations. Shall the mighty State of 
this hemisphere — the pioneer of the liberal principle of the greatest 
good to the greatest number — be known to the red and black races 
struggling into existence, under liberal forms of government, in neigh- 
boring climes suited to their caste, only as a depredator and enslaver 1 
They seem to have been committed to our guardianship by the gracious 
Providence that has conferred so many blessings upon us in the achieve- 
ment of our own liberties. Shall we abnse the power thus conferred 
by establishing bondage as the law for all whom we can master 1 

I dare not speak for all the States, but for that in which I live I 
can assert that there is a strong feeling among the masses to absolve 
Missouri from the shame of countenancing the slave trade, foreign or 
domestic, or of increasing the burden upon the Union by emptying the 
Treasury and creating a national debt to buy islands of slaves, e7i masse, 
for others' uses, or even of continuing the abuse within its own limits, 
to foster the pride of a few at the expense of the interests of the many. 
But there are diflBculties in accomplishing this last point, that the peo- 
ple of the free States do not seem to estimate ; and yet, when nearly 
one-half of these States have laws on their statute books prohibiting the 
immigration of free negroes into them, they should understand why it 
is that almost every man repels any scheme of emancipation which 
would let loose a hundred thousand negroes in Missouri, either to prey 
upon the community as paupers, or to become competitors with the free 
white laborer for wages. The removal of the manumitted slaves is a 
sine qva non in every State that looks to deliverance from Slavery. 

The alternatives through which this inexorable condition is to be 
reached ought to be well considered by every friend of emancipation. 
Missouri may be delivered by selling the slaves in a Southern market, 
or by sending them, as the Indians were sent, to freeholds abroad, at 
the expense of the General Government. The riddance to be obtained 



25 

by selling the slaves of Missouri, their owners would recoil from with 
commendable repugnance. It is a great error to impute to slave-owners 
generally, but especially to those of the farming States, a want of feel- 
ing for their slaves. The hearts of Southern men, though slaveholders, 
are alive to as generous and tender emotions as any on earth, and they 
feel family ties bind them to the slaves who have been associated in its 
cares and labors, almost as strongly as the ties of consanguinity. It is 
the reluctance to subject them to more intense labor under overseers, with- 
out the family sympathies to make them lenient, that forms an obstruction 
to Missouri's becoming a free State by the sale of that class of her peo- 
ple. As freedmen, neither the North nor the South will receive them; 
and unless a better home is made for them abroad, the process now 
going forward in Missouri to emancipate the State must consign them 
to the cotton region. The immense accession to her white population 
from the East, during the last year and this, has put in motion a mass 
of another hue toward the South, and more light will pursue this dark 
retreating body, as it follows the shadow of a cloud passing from our 
fields. The temptation held out by Missouri — the middle pathway of 
nations — inviting emigration from all the world, is now too great to be 
resisted by its comparatively small body of slaves. Here the emigrant 
from every State in the Union and of Europe may find a kinsman, and 
men from all the world will find themselves in the midst of its staples. 
Here are mountains of iron and wildernesses of timber, and the earth 
teeming with coal and lead and other minerals. Materials to fill the 
hand of man with machinery, and to furnish that Promethean heat 
with which he gives life and activity to the world of his creation. Mis- 
souri — seated at the confluence of her mighty floods, that bring with 
them all the tribute of the farthest North and West, and make return with 
the luxuries of the richest tropics of the earth — with one hand ex- 
tended, she now reaches the seaports of the Atlantic ; she is stretch- 
ing the other to the Pacific for its golden treasures and the wealth of 
the Indies. It is madness to suppose that she will long endure the 
decrepitude of Slavery. And while her slaves and those of the South- 
ern States within the temperate zone are an encumbrance to them, if 
set free, and seated within the tropics, they would be worth much to 
the nation and to the world. The value of a dependency there, made 
up of our emancipated blacks, may be estimated by the readiness of 
some of our statesmen to pay $300,000,000 for the island of Cuba, 
which the law. of gravitation, that attracts feeble countries to their 
strong neighbors, will bring to us before long without payment, and 
which, if we should now purchase it, could only be the right of unrestrict- 
ed trade, and not the land and slaves, which would still belong to their 
present owners. 

If the trade of Cuba, with its one million laborers, is worth this vast 
sum, how shall we estimate that of a dependency peopled by our 
4,000,000 of freed blacks, whose superior intelligence would dominate 
all the races of the tropics, and bring them under our influence — a re- 
gion richer than any other tropical country in the world, because lying 
in the track of the southeast and northeast trade winds, which, passing 
over an immense expanse of ocean, gather moisture that is precipitated 



26 

upon the lofty mountains of the interior, and create the largest rivers 
on the globe, and make the land bloom with eternal verdnre. For this 
reason, the tropics of America exceed in fertility all other intertropical 
regions, in which drouth prevails for one half of the year, and the other 
half is the season of floods. Instead, therefore, of being an expense to 
the nation, the foundation of such a colony would be the grandest com- 
mercial enterprise of the age. The richest tropics in the world, lying 
adjacent to us, opened up to us by a people speaking our own language, 
deeply imbued with our ideas of government and religion, leaning upon 
us for support and guidance, and to whom the climate is innocuous. 
How different would our India be from that of Great Britain, where, to 
make a market, she is compelled to coerce a hostile people, speaking a 
different tongue, having a different religion and government, distant 
from her thousands of miles, and with a climate destructive to those 
through whom she maintains her ascendency ! 

Are the young merchants of Boston and of America indifferent to an 
enterprise which would give to our commerce, without a rival, such an 
empire as that to which I have pointed 1 — an empire not to be won by 
cruelty and conquest, but by peaceful and benignant means, by impart- 
ing to others the inestimable blessing of liberty which we enjoy, and 
removing from our midst the only cause which threatens the prosperity 
and stability of our Union.^ Are the merchants of Boston, to whom I 
now address myself, indifferent to that other grand enterprise which has 
so often been pointed out to them by the ablest statesmen of our coun- 
try, and by means of which we shall contend with Europe for the com- 
merce of Asia and the islands of the East, and from a vantage ground 
which insures our success 1 I allude, of course, to the highway of na- 
tions through the heart of our country, connecting the Atlantic and 
Pacific oceans. Let me say to you, that it is this great highway, giving 
to our race its seat of empire within the temperate zones of this conti- 
nent, and commanding the commerce of the East, which is to strengthen 
them for the civilization and peaceful conquest of the American tropics, 
through the instrumentality of that race which an inscrutable Provi- 
dence appears to have placed among us to be fitted for the task. We 
shall then see the great Gulf Stream, which gathers its mighty volume 
beneath the tropics, and washes the whole Atlantic front of the conti- 
nent, bearing upon its bosom to all our cities the tributes of a richer 
and vaster commerce than that with which India has enriched and built 
up mighty nations, to perish with its loss. 

It is this connection between the two oceans by railroad which is to 
make for the Confederacy five great free States beyond the Mississippi. 
Add to this measure one which shall secrire to every man a homestead 
in the public domain, inalienable, except by devise, and you shall see 
free States arise like magic in the great West — free, because, where 
every man is a landholder, no man can be a slaveholder ; and so well 
is this understood, that you will find no supporter of the slaveholding 
oligarchy who can be induced to support a measure by which the public 
lands will pass easily and rapidly to actual settlers. When by this 
process the number and the power of the free States are multiplied, and 
the slave States lose the ability, in combination with that interested 



capital elsewhere wliicli always sympathizes with the capital invested in 
negroes, to command the Presidency and control the Government, Sla- 
very will cease to be a political question in the nation, and will be re- 
mitted to the people within the States, divested of all political motives 
for maintaining it, to be dealt with as an economical question. The re- 
sult will be emancipation of the slaves, upon the compensation and by 
the consent of the masters, because it will be for the interest of all. 
The fact that the slaveholding interest has, by such combination, con- 
trolled the Government, and commanded its powers and its immense 
patronage, is of itself a motive for sustaining the institution infinitely 
greater than the profit it brings to the masters. Take that away by 
the measures which will create in the least possible time a vast prepon- 
derance of free States, and Slavery must stand on its own merits, 
stripped of the strength it possesses— by being, in fact, the Govern- 
ment of this country, dispensing a patronage of $100,000,000 per an- 
num, and able to gratify or disappoint the wishes of every man of am- 
bition in the nation — when the divine institution ceases in fact to be the 
Government of the United States, it will receive no more honor than 
the divine right of Kings, in the person of some deposed and fugitive 
dynasty. How many who swore fealty to Louis Philippe are now 
ready to take service with the Emperor Napoleon III? Wijl those 
who bow to the black idol of Slavery, because it confers upon its par- 
tisans the honors and emoluments of the State and National Govern- 
ments, refuse to worship at the loftier and purer shrine of Liberty, 
when the same motives prompt their devotions ? 

I believe that, when Slavery no longer wields the political power^ of 
this great Government, it will fall of its own weight. Emancipation 
and the removal of the enfranchised race to the tropics will follow, and 
the Southern States will fill up with people of our own race ; and the 
pretext now put forth for monopolizing the soil by slave labor, that the 
white man cannot work in that climate, will be found to be a sheer fal- 
lacy. Nowhere do the powers of the white race, mental and physical, 
attain greater perfection. And are we to be told, in defiance of the 
decree that " in the sweat of his brow man should live," that the high- 
est endowments were conferred on him in a rich and genial region, that 
they might be buried in indolence 1 Fact disproves it, as well as the- 
ory. Throughout the whole race-horse clime, the white man is stronger 
in endurance than the African. Our whole country is in the temperate, 
not the torrid, zone; and we find that, even in the cotton country of 
Texas, the emigrant Germans produce the best and highest-priced cot- 
ton, and more of it to the acre, than is grown on slave plantations. 
When the cloud passes off from Virginia, and its renovation is pre- 
scribed in the adjoining Carolinas, it will pass, too, from their worn-out 
lands, and white freeholders will renew them, and make more cotton 
from their hundred-acre fields than will be obtained frop plantations of 
a thousand devastated by slave culture. This wonder is already open- 
ing the eyes of farmers in Maryland and Virginia, who see wheat fields 
created without a slave making ten-fold to the acre over their poor crops 
spread over their African wastes. The great mountain plateau that 
runs through Mexico, and follows the Pacific down into the tropics, 



28 

makes the only region where civilization has touched the Indian, and 
softened his savage nature ; and the only stable Government now ex- 
isting in these regions is that wielded by Rafael Carrera, the Indian 
dictator of Guatemala. The negro alone can reclaim the vast level 
plains and pampas, the tierra caliente of the continent. Shall the races 
conform to the law of their creation, or shall we attempt to change the 
order of nature, and bring retribution upon ourselves by striving to 
subvert with our devices the decrees of Omnipotence 1 

How grandly our nation would loom up in the eyes of the world, if, 
abandoning the policy which makes it the taskmaster of slaves, it should 
lay its hands to the work not only of restoring freedom to the race which 
has so long and so faithfully served us and our fathers, but to recom- 
pense them for their long servitude, by giving them all homes in regions 
congenial to their natures, and guarantying to them a free government 
of their own, in which, without ceasing to be a part of this country, 
they should still be to themselves, and escape the presence of that 
social subordination and inferiority inseparable from the contact of dif- 
ferent races in the same community. The moral power and grandeur 
of the act would challenge the admiration of the world, and make our 
later fame surpass the glory of the great struggle which gave us a place 
among nations. 



APPENDIX. 



Containing extracts from letters from Mr. Jejferson, from speeches of Hon. Mr. 
Trumbull of Illinois and Hon. Preston King of New York, Resolution of Hon. 
J. R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, Letters of Governor Bissell of Illinois, Robert 
Wiclcliffe of Kentucky, James 0. Brodhead of Missouri, Hon. Gerrii Smith of 
New York, Benjamin SilUman of Yale College, Rev. Theodore Parker of Boston, 
and extracts from the letters of several free colored men of education and intelli- 
gence, on the subject of the emanciiiation and colonization of the blacks in the 
tropics of America. 

The colonization of our free blacks in the tropical regions of America was sug- 
gested by Mr. Jefferson. It is a subject of such magnitude and interest that I shall 
quote two paragraphs from his letters, to show that he contemplated this plan, and 
deemed it absolutely essential to the safety of our nation. In a letter addressed to 
Mr. Sparks, he said : 

" The second object, and the most interesting to us, as coming home to our physi- 
' cal and moral characters, to our happiness and safety, is to provide an asylum, to 
• which we can, by degrees, send the whole of that population (the negroes) from 
' among us, and establish them under our patronage and protection, as a separate, 
' free, and independent people, in some country and climate friendly to human life 
^ and happiness." 

In a letter to Mr. Coles, he said : 

" Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time. It will come ; 
' and whether brought on by the generous energies of our own minds, or by the 
' bloody process of St. Domingo, excited and conducted by the power of our present 
' enemy, if once stationed permanently within our country, and offering asylum and 
' arms to the oppressed, is a leaf of our history not yet turned over." 

I shall also embrace this opportunity to publish a number of letters received after 
the speech made by me on the 14th January, 1858, in which this topic was broached. 
Among others, one from Robert Wickliffe, Esq., the most eminent lawyer of Ken- 
tucky, and one of the largest slaveholders in that State ; one from Gov. Bissell, of 
Illinois ; a letter from James 0. Brodhead, of Missouri, formerly a State Senator, 
and now a distinguished lawyer ; an extract from a speech of Senator King, of New 
York ; and an extract from a speech of Senator Trumbull, of Illinois ; aud a res- 
olution offered by Senator Doolittle, of Wisconsin. I shall also publish the letters 
of Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, and Benjamin Silliman, and several very inter- 
esting letters from free colored men of intelligence and education — all showing that 
the plan struck out by the philosophical mind of Mr. Jefferson, and which I have 
attempted to bring to public attention, contains the true solution of the Slavery 
question in this country, and will finally unite all interests for its accomplishment. 

Extract from the Speech of Hon. Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois, delivered at Chicago, 

August 7, 1858. 
The charge that we want to have anything to do with negroes, is utterly untrue. 
It is a false clamor, raised to mislead the public mind. Our policy is, to have 
nothing to do with them ; and I myself am very much inclined to favor the project 



30 

suggested by Mr. Blair, of Missouri, at the last session of Congress. He suggested 
a plan for colonizing our free negroes, who are willing to go, somewhere in Central 
America, where an arrangement could be made by which their rights may be se- 
cured to them. The policy now is such as to prevent emancipation ; and although 
\ we do not want to interfere with the domestic institution of Slavery in the States, 
! still we wish to interpose no obstacle to the people of those States in getting rid of 
their slaves whenever they think fit to do so. 

We know that many of the slave States have passed laws prohibiting the emanci- 
pation of slaves by their masters, unless they are taken out of the State. The result 
of this legislation is, that emancipation must cease. There are thousands of free 
negroes in Virginia, but that policy is now stopped, because it is impracticable, there 
being no way of disposing of the negro when emancipation is prohibited. Many 
masters in the South desire to emancipate their slaves, and especially is this the 
case as they approach death ; for, however they may reason while in health, and 
thoughtless of that event which levels all alike, they are very apt, in making up their 
last account and disposing of their property, to think of the wrong and injustice they 
have done by holding some of their fellow-men in bondage, and they are quite willing 
to emancipate them. Thousands would be emancipated if there was any place to 
which they could go. I, for one, am very much disposed to favor the colonization 
of such free negroes as are willing to go to Central America. I want to have noth- 
ing to do either with the free negro or the slave negro. We, the Republican party, 
j are the white man's party. We are for free white men, and for making white labor 
' respectable and honorable, which it never can be when negro slave labor is brought 
into competition with it. 

We wish to settle the Territories with free white men, and we are willing that this 
negro race should go anywhere that it can to better its condition, wishing them God 
speed wherever they go. We believe it is better for us that they should not be 
among us. I believe it will be better for them to go elsewhere. 

A Voice. Where to ? 

Mr. T. I would say, to any Central American State that will make an arrange- 
ment by which they will be secure in their rights until they arrive at a time when 
they can protect and take care of themselves. 

Extract Jrom the Speech of Preston King in the Senate on the Oregon Bill, ( Con- 
gressional Globe, p. 2207, vol. *6'.)47 

The only mode in which we can relieve our country, relieve the blacks and the 
whites, divide these races, and provide separate homes for them, is by some scheme 
ichich icill meet the approbation of both — one which the 2Mrties themselves loill exe- 
cute. I think well of a scheme presented of a colony in South America — or Central 
America, perhaps, is better — extending to it such aid and protection from this Gov- 
ernment as would be perfectly legitimate and proper, in the hope that such a meas- 
ure would be the best means of accomplishing a result so desirable for the benefit 
of both white and black. I think some such result as this will come, in one way or 
another, from the collision of interests, from inevitable causes, and from the compe- 
tition of free and slave labor. 

* * * As I said, the condition of things now is such as requires something of 
this sort. They are looking to emancipation in Missouri, beyond all question. Their 
newspapers are discussing it, and I have no doubt that, in other border States, that 
idea would be more generally entertained, if a rational easy mode of providing for 
the black population was ready at hand. Indeed, I remember, when the annexa- 
tion of Texas was discussed here, and through the country, that one of the strongest 
arguments used in favor of annexation, through all that part of the country where I 
reside, was, that bringing Texas into the Union as a more extreme Southern State 
would draw off the black population from all the border slave States, and that they 
would become free States. * * * I speak of this to bring the subject to the 
attention of the Senate, and to avoid my wish and disposition, in any practicable 
mode, to aid in providing such a place for the free blacks of the country. 

yj^^Jt^lA:, 1858. Senate of the United States, [Congressional Globe, vol. 1^^.3034.) 
Mr. Doolittle, of Wisconsin, submitted the following resolution, which lies over 
under the rule : 

" Whereas the numerous disabilities to which free persons of color, of African 



31 

descent, are subjected in many of the free States, have made It desirable on the 
part of large numbers of them to seek elsewhere a more favorable field for their 
labor and enterprise ; and whereas the same class of persons is regarded with still 
greater disfavor in the slaveholding States, from considerations deemed so controlling 
that further emancipation in many of them has been prohibited by law, unless the 
persons emancipated shall be at the same time removed beyond the jurisdiction of 
the State; and in some of them the graver question is seriously entertained, whether 
persons of African descent, who are now free, shall not be again reduced to slavery 
if they continue to remain within their jurisdiction; and whereas, in Yucatan and 
Central and South America, there are vast regions, almost uninhabited, of the most 
beautiful and productive countries in the world, in a climate well adapted to the 
constitution of the African race, to develop its greatest power and highest activity: 
therefore, 

'' Resolved, That the Committee on Foreign Relations inquire into the expediency 
of acquiring by treaty, in Yucatan, Central or South America, the rights and privi- 
leges of settlement and of citizenship for the benefit of such persons of color, of Afri- 
can descent, as may voluntarily desire to emigrate from the United States, and form 
themselves into a colony or colonies, under the laws of the State or States to which 
they emigrate ; the United States, in consideration of the commercial advantages of 
free trade with such colony or colonies, making and securing the necessary and 
proper engagements to maintain them in the enjoyment of the rights and privileges 
acquired by such treaty or treaties." 

Letter from Governor Bissell of Illinois. — [Extract.) 

Springfield, Illinois, Januai-y 27, 1858. 
I have been greatly interested in the perusal of your speech. * * * You 
have undoubtedly struck the right chord, and I pray God that you and I may live to 
see the day when your views will be carried into practice. I deem your plan per- 
fectly feasible ; and although some difficulties we may expect to find in reducing it 
to practice, yet they are not insurmountable. But I only designed at this moment 
to thank you for the speech, and to express my hearty approbation of its doctrine. 

Ever yours, WILLIAM H. BISSELL. 

To Hon. F. P. Blair. 

I desire to call especial attention io the letter of Mr. Wickliffe ; he was a cotempo- 
rary of Jefferson, and one of his most earnest and able supporters ; age has not di- 
minished the vigor of an intellect which, for half a centuiy, placed him at the head of 
the bar of Kentucky, with the strongest men in the Union for his competitors. Mr. 
Wickliffe is one of the wealthiest men and largest slaveholders of his State. 

Letter from li. Wickliffe, Esq. 

Lexington, Kt., March 13, 1858. 

Dear Sir : My ill health has prevented me from acknowledging before the favor you 
have done me in sending me your speech, delivered in the House of Representatives 
on the 14th of January, upon the subject of colonizing free blacks from the United 
States in Central America. In early life I thought much on the subject of which 
your speech treats, and my thoughts went even farther. I have believed that the 
Government of the United States ought not only to acquire sufficient territory to 
create a State large enough for colonizing the free blacks, but that an office should 
be created to remove them to their country, and a fund provided to purchase all 
slaves whose masters were willing to sell. The establishment of the Colonization 
Society, however, and the extensive bodies of sugar and cotton lands acquired by 
the General Government, destroyed all hopes I ever entertained of achieving my 
object in my time. I am glad, however, you have brought the subject before Con- 
gress and the world, and hope that something may be done that will not only do im- 
mediate credit to the country, by adopting some mode to bring perpetual Slavery to 
a terminating point, as well as leaving no longer food to the disputants about the 
question of power between the South and the North. 

I thank you, sir, for this mark of your attention, and believe me to be ever yours, 
respectfully, R. WICKLIFFE. 

To F. P. Blair, Jun. 



32 

Extract of a Letter from Hon. James 0. Brodhead, 

BOWLINGREEN, PiKE Co., Mo., Jail. 23, 1858. 

Dear Sir : You will permit one who has taken a more than ordinary degree of 
personal interest in your movements for some years past, to congratulate you upon 
the crowning effort of your life, in the delivery of your speech on the Central Amer- 
ican question. 

There is a tone of enlarged patriotism about the proposition embraced in your 
resolution, which has been in vain looked for in the vapid and ephemeral efforts of 
party hacks for the last ten years, in Congress or out of it. Besides, the idea is a 
practical one, if not practicable, and, at the same time, it is national, divested of all 
sectionalism. It takes out of the mouth of the slaveholder the words which are 
always first on his lips when a Northern man says anything about the negro, " that 
is none of your business." In reply, the Northern man can say, it is our business, 
for we have free negroes as well as you ; it is for our interest, as well as yours, to get 
rid of a degraded race, aliens to us in political and social relations ; and thus it is 
that a fatal blow is given to Southern fanaticism, at a point where it cannot be par- 
ried. Many a Southern man has refused to look into the question, and sheltered 
himself behind that declaration, " It is none of your business." 

Iietter from Gerrit Smith. 

Peterboro, April 7, 1858. 
Dear Sir : You were so good as to send me a copy of your speech of January 
14th. Never until to-day did I give it an attentive reading. I am now prepared to 
thank you for it very heartily, and to confess that it has enlightened and gratified 
me. * * * 

Greatly should I rejoice in your proposed outlet for our free colored people. That 
outlet once provided, and vast numbers of this people would hasteh to avail them- 
selves of it. I would have the immigration entirely voluntary, and so would 
you. * * * 

Yours, &c., GERRIT SMITH. 

F. P. Blair, Jun. 

Letter f-om Gerrit Stnith. 

Peterboro, Aj^ril 24, 1858. 
Dear Sir ; * * * I agree fully with you, that the mass of the whites in the 
slave States would be in favor of emancipation, could an outlet for the emancipated 
be afforded. Such an outlet there would be, were there a well-protected lilaek State 
in Mexico or Central America for our blacks to go to. The further it were from us, 
'and the more different its soil and climate from ours, the less probability would there 
be of a desii'e on either part to have that State become a member of our Union. 

Among all feasible things, there is nothing that, in my judgment, would so much 
promote a peaceful aljolition of Slavery as your son's plan. Let him be careful that 
no part of it be couched in words that would offend the blacks, or invade their self- 
respect. The plan, to succeed, must be such as will in every way please them, and 
increase, rather than waste, their too little self-respect. 

Yery truly yours, GERRIT SMITH. 

To F. P. Blair, Sen. 

Peterboro, April 13, 1858. 

Dear Sir : It is with very great pleasure I received your letter. The copies of 
your son's admirable speech, which you say you sent me, I have not yet received. 

I am decidedly in favor of inviting our free colored people to colonize in Central 
America. Africa is too^far off. The idea of returning to her all her children upon 
the continent and islands of America, is absurd. They will at no very distant day 
congregate in our western equatorial regions, say within fifteen or twenty degrees of 
the equator. 

But I will consent to no form of compulsion to promote this colonization. Let 
the world be all before the black as well as the white man. Let them be entirely 
free to stay where they are, or go where they please ; and wherever they may be, let 
them not be denied a single right of their manhood. 

Yours, GERRIT SMITH. 

F. P. Blair, Esq. 



33 

Letter from B. Silliman. 

New Haven, Conn., , 1858. 

Dear Sir : Although late, I beg you to accept my thanks for your very able, 
instructive, and interesting speech ot January 14th, 1858, of which I received a copy 
franked by your name. I perused that speech with great attention. It was patriotic, 
far-seeing, and benevolent, as regards that already powerful body which must one 
day become a dangerous element of our population. 

It is most unwise — and especially for those States in which this population ia 
condensed, and in which it is daily increasing with alarming rapidity, it is infatua- 
tion — to ignore present evil and future danger. 

Having been somewhat acquainted with Missouri, and especially with the beauti- 
ful city of St. Louis, which is so honorably represented by yourself, I rejoice in the 
auspicious prospect now opening, that Slavery will eventually retire from its borders. 

Yours, respectfully and truly, " B. SILLIMAN. 

Letter from Rev. Theodore Parker. 

Boston, Jaji. 26, 1858. 

Dear Sir: Excuse a stranger for troubling you with a word. I have just read 
your excellent speech — it is published in the Daily Advertiser of this morning, the 
most important journal in New England. Allow me to thank you for it with all ray 
heart. I think there has been no such Anti-Slavery speech in Congress, since Mr. 
Sumner's, until Mr. Hale spoke last week. It is a good sign, when the member 
from Missouri can say such things. 

Yours, &c., T. PARKER. 

' Letter from Alfred V. Thompson, (a hlack man.) 

Cincinnati, Ohio, June 5, 1858. 

Sir : I have read your speech two or three times on the colonizing of colored 
people in South America, and am much interested in it, and must say I am highly 
pleased with the plan. I have showed it to several, and they are much pleased with 
the document, and have worn out the speech, and hope you will send us three copies. 

It is just the plan for us disfranchised Americans. I am naturally of an enter- 
prising disposition, and have never found any cause to so elate me since I espoused 
emigration in 1842, when we left for Liberia with the view that we as a people could 
not attain to any honorable position in this country, nationally speaking. I was 
much pleased with our condition in Africa, fi-om the fact that I saw no superior oa 
account of color. (The Government was a Republic something like this. I don't 
like the British Government, though I prefer it to our condition in this.) Our rea- 
son for leaving Liberia, after living there for eighteen months, was on account of bad 
health, and through the advice and persuasion of Dr. J. W. Lugenbeel, our attend- 
ant family physician, who said if we remained we should certainly die ; therefore, we 
left for Jamaica. Out of the company of emigrants that left America for Africa, 
numbering two hundred and twenty-five, at the expiration of eighteen months there 
was not living more than eighty-five or one hundred. We lost two children in the 
undertaking; my wife and myself sufi'ered immensely. After we left for Jamaica, we 
stopped for three months at Sierra Leone, Africa. We lived in Kingston for three years, 
and in other parts of the island. Lived in Boston, New York, and Philadephia, for 
two years, having remained out of the United States several years, and having trav- 
elled considerable at my own expense, I might say I have some experience in emi- 
gration. But, notwithstanding all this loss of time and deprivation, I have acquired 
a small property and a nice little business. But, with the proper assistance, I am 
■willing to try it again, though my wife says she will never leave the land of her fore- 
fathers. There is a great demand'on me from the colored population for information 
in regard to this project, and I hope you will send me the necessary documents to 
post myself. You mention in your speech several documents that would be of im- 
mense advantage in defending my position. I wish to know how and by what means 
the necessary aid and jsrotectiou is to be given, and if in your opinion the Govern- 
ment will give any assistance. We have had three meetings on this subject, and 
thought of forming ourselves into a joint stock company, and issue $100 bonds and 
aid ourselves as much as possible, and to beg from individuals. State Governments, 
sell bonds, &c., &c. Please inform me where I can obtain a constitution and by- 

3 



34 

laws of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society. I learned my trade with Mr, An- 
drew Johnson, of Tennessee, Ex-Governor, now member of the Senate, who can give 
any information in regard to me. He will recollect the boy he used to call Alfred, 
You will do me a great favor to answer this soon. 

I am, with much respect, your most obedient servant, 

ALFRED VANACTER THOMPSON. 
Letter from J. D. Harris, [a black man.) 

Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 10, 1858. 

Dear Sir : Having full faith in the principle of your able speech delivered in 
Congress Jan. 14, 1858, in which you urge the necessity of acquiring territory out- 
side of the United States for the settlement of the freed colored people, I take the 
liberty of addressing you this letter. 

I assure you that the thinking portion of the colored people appreciate your ef- 
forts in that direction ; for while it is evident that the white and black races cannot 
exist in this country on terms of equality, it is equally certain the latter will not 
long be content with anything less. 

Against the Government, its laws, and its customs, they are fast beginning to 
rebel ; and even while I write, in consequence of a late fugitive slave case, this spirit 
is spreading to a marvellous extent. 

The Government drives us to Canada, where we are indeed free, but where it is 
plain we cannot become a very great people. We want more room, where it is not 
quite so cold — we want to be identified with the ruling power of a nation ; and un- 
less this be obtained, Canada must be looked to as a strong military post for future 
use, in the very vitals of America. 

But you will not forgive me for addressing you (if at all) in a tone so pointed, 
and I therefore cease, humbly beseeching you will bring the subject again before 
Congress ; and when you have so far progressed as to need an agent among our peo- 
ple, whether it be to spread such information as will awaken them to their true in- 
terests, or to carry out some plan or expedition that may be devised, begging to be 
remembered as one who deeply feels the present embarassing condition of his race, 
and who is willing to sacrifice his time, his comfort, and his life, in order to create 
for them a higher and more ennobling position. 

I have the honor to be, &c., J. D. HARRIS. 

Letter from M. 11. Detant/, (a black man.) 

Chatham, C. W., Feb. 24, 1858. 

Sir : I take the liberty of sending you, which I beg you will at your earliest 
leisure peruse, a paper written and reported by myself to a Convention of colored 
people at the place indicated, which was then accepted in the form of a report 
emanating from a committee. 

I beg, sir, that you will give it your earliest attention, and favor me with your 
opinion thereon, knowing that as an enlightened statesman you will readily account 
for anything that may be too pointed or tart. 

I have not as yet had the gratification of seeing your speech, but have been 
strongly requested by Messrs. Holly and Whitfield, of New Haven and Buffalo, to 
communicate with you on the subject. I was at the time I wrote the report a resi- 
dent of Pittsburgh, Pa. 

See report on the Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Conti- 
nent, page 33. 

I have the honor to be, sir, ytur most obedient servant, M. R. DELANY. 

From Rev. James T. Holly, of New Haven, Conn., Rector of St. Luke^s. 

Hon. Sir : As the communication I voluntarily intruded upon your attention In 
relation to your recent speech in favor of colonizing the free blacks in Central 
America has been so kindly received by you, I am encouraged to pursue the sub- 
ject, especially since you have given me the liberty to do so. 

1 have already called your attention to the fact that the subject has actively occu- 
pied the attention of this class of persons themselves since 1854, when an organiza- 
tion was formed among them, to promote their own emigration to the West Indies, 



35 

Oientral and South America. I now wish to speak of the extent of this organiza- 
tion, its sympathizers, and the steps that have been taken to attain its end. 

You have doubtless noticed, by the copy of the published proceedings of its or- 
ganic Convention which I transmitted to you, that delegates from the British Prov- 
ince of Canada and eleven States of this Union (three of them being slave States) 
assembled in that Convention. And in the othcial organization of the National 
Board as a Central Executive Committee, corresponding members among the free 
colored people of no less than tive slaveholding States were attached to that Board. 

But even the organisation in its extent is but a feeble expression of the growing 
feelings of discontent at their anomalous condition in this country, now rife among 
the free blacks, both North and South. Many arc not identified with this move- 
ment, because they look upon the effort to remove and colonize themselves as 
wholly impracticable without the helping bund of men of power, influence, and 
wealth, aniong the whites of this country. And despairing now to obtain this in- 
fluence in Ikvor of their removal to the intertropical regions of this continent whilst 
the African coloniKation scheme preoccupied the attention of the American people, 
they have looked upon this organisation of their own people as a fond Utopia, to be 
dreamed cif^ but never to be realized. Hence they have been too hopeless of ac- 
complishing their heart's desire to join pnblicly in this movement hitherto. 

But now\hat your speech in Congress opens a new era in their hopes, and they 
thereby witness "the dawn of a brighter day ibr the successful accomplishnient of 
their hopes, I can assure you that thousands can be readily enrolled as emigrants 
to the intertropical regions of our continent with the slightest eftbrt, I speak now 
from a familiar and somewhat extended acquaintance and intercourse with them, 
with especial reference to this subject, during the past five years, by travelling and 
sojourning among them in the New England, Middle, and Northwestern States and 
Canada—having at the same time met and conversed with free colored men from 
almost ev>ery sla\'c State in our Union^ 

I am confident that with proper inducements to be held out before them in re- 
gard to security for liberty, property, and prospects for well doing, I could muster 
two hundred emigrant families, or about one thousand free colored persons, annual- 
ly, for the next five years, of the very best class for colonial settlement and industry, 
from various parts of the United States and Canada, who will gladly embark for 
homes in our American tropics. At the end of this period, it would need no espe- 
cial efforts to promote the emigration, because it would regulate itself thereafter. 
Five thousand pioneers by this time having already settled themselves in Central 
America, having commenced to do well in their new homes, would spread the glad 
tidings among friends and relations remaining behind them in the United States, 
and the intelligence flying from family to family like an electric spark, a spontane- 
ous emigration, double that of the first, will follow in the second five years, and this 
number will !>e trebled or (juadrupled in the succeeding decade. 

The feelings of the free blacks in relation to African colonization are no criterion 
by which to judge of the success of Anierico.n intertropical emigration. The blacks 
have the most inveterate prejudice against being separated from the New World, 
that has been the field of their labors ond sufferings for the past three centuries. It 
is a little hard even to leave the very spot on which they chanced to be born, for 
they a-re a very domestic race, and strong in their local attachments. Novertheless, 
they can and will easily reconcile themselves to the irresistible fate of local separa- 
tion frofn the whites of this country, when they can locate on the same continent, 
within a few days sail of the scenes of their nativity, and situated, as they would be, 
in the grand American thoroughfare between our Atlantic and Pacific States, This 
constant intercourse they would enjoy with white Americans, by means of travel 
through the tropics between the two ocean shores of our country, would make 
the blacks feel as if they had not lost their homes with us ; and, therefore, would 
render them contented and happy in their lot. This can never be the case in Afri- 
can coSonisation, since by this scheme they are not only expatriated from their coun- 
try, but also exiled from our Western World. Hence, I believe, I have data from 
personal knowledge, which will fully justify the expectation, that with proper efforts, 
more emigrants of this class will be removed to Central America in ten years than 
has been removed to Liberia during the forty years efforts of the colonization scheme. 
As a further insight to you of the depth and extent of this movement among the 



36 

free blacks themselves, I send you a copy of the proceedings of a Convention held 
by the colored people of the United States and Canada as early as 1853, iu which 
the subject of emigration to the West Indies, Central and South America, was 
broached. And I also transmit another pamphlet, published early in 1854, contain- 
ing a newspaper controversy between three of the ablest negro writers in the country, 
on the subject of this selfsame emigration. This controversy was preliminary to the 
assembling of their organic Convention in the same year. 

This movement, although almost entirely confined among the blacks, so far, yet 
it can boast some interested sympathizers among the whites, to whose attention it 
has been presented, and who only await a more tangible and influential organization, 
and a more definite knowledge of what is to be done, in order to lend it a helping 
hand. Among others, I may mention C. W. Elliott, Esq., author of a History of 
New England, and F. L. Olmsted, Esq., author of a recent work entitled Our Sect/- 
board Slave States. Numerous others can be easily interested, when the subject hag 
been put in working shape by those who have the i>ractical ability to do it. Having 
now spoken of the extent of this movement among the free blacks themselves, ana 
also referred to a few sympathizers it has already invoked in an unostentatious man- 
ner among the whites, I now turn to speak of the practical efforts this organization 
has put forth in pursuance of its objects. 

In one year after its organic Convention, a commissioner was appointed by the 
National Board or Central Committee of the same, to proceed to Hayti on a mis- 
sion to Faustin First, for the purpose of making and receiving propositions on the 
subject of encouraging colored Americans to emigrate to that island, by holding a 
conference thereon with the Haytien Government- This commissioner went to 
Port-au-Prince during the summer of 1855 to prosecute hia mission, and returned 
and reported its results at the biennial session of this Board of Emigration, held in 
Cleveland, Ohio, August 26, 27, 1856, The commissioner was cordially received by 
the Haytien Government, and his propositions kindly entertained and considered j 
but in consequence of the domestic complications arising out of the internal feuds, 
and the civil war then brewing between Hayti and Dominica, the Government of 
the Emperor Faustin was not prepared to accede to or advance any propositions 
on the subject of this emigration, any further than the announcement of the fact thai 
it would be happy to welcome all such emigrants whenever they might be pleased 
to come to Hayti. 

The propositions submitted by the commissioner were substantially as follows : 

1. The Haytien Government was desired to offer encouragements to emigrants of 
color coming to Hayti, to establish themselves in the mountains and valleys of that 
island, to cultivate with their own bands private homesteads to be donated to them 
by the Government. 

2. The Haytien Government to guaranty to these emigrants the enjoyment and 
equal civil and political rights with the natives of the country, and liberty of con- 
science in religious worship. 

3. None of the emigrants or their children to do military duty until seven yeara 
after their arrival in Hayti ; ministers of the gospel, physicians, lawyers, and school 
teachers, to be always exempt from that duty. 

4. The Government to aid in the erection of manufacturing establishments, sugar 
refineries, grist and saw mills, for such emigrants as might be competent to conduct 
such works. The advances of the Government in this respect to be reimbursed out 
of the future profits of these works. 

5. The Government to exempt from duty all materials, tools, furniture, &c., 
brought or imported by emigrants in the island for the purpose of carrying on their 
labors. 

6. The emigrants to become Haytien citizens, invested with all the privileges, 
prerogatives, and immunities of the same, after one year's residence, on taking the 
oath of allegiance. 

7. The Haytien Government to appoint a commissioner to reside in the United 
States and co-operate with the National Board or Central Committee of the Emigra- 
tion Society in the general supervision of the embarkation of the emigrants from 
the United States. 

8. On condition that the Haytien Government would fulfil the above requirements, 
th© National Board would guaranty a select emigration of two hundred families or 



37 

one thonsand persons per annum for five years, and one thousand families 
or five thousand persons in addition thereto, if these governmental inducements 
should be continued two years longer. After seven years duration, the scheme to 
be abandoned, and left to regulate'itself as a voluntary and spontaneous individual 
emigration thereafter, 

These propositions were left open for the subsequent consideration and action of 
the Haytien Government, But as the Government has not since responded any 
further on this subject, the prospect of a movement in that direction remains in 
statu qiio. But whilst darkness seems to be still brooding over the one, yet on the 
other hand new prospects seem to be dawning in the direction of Central America, 
by the bold and unequivocal position you have been pleased to assume voluntarily, 
in the Congress of the United States. It is fit that the subject should be agitated 
there by such an able advocate as you have proved yourself to be, in order that it 
may go forth with a telling efiect upon the whole country. But opportune agitation 
in Congress in this manner is all that I believe can be done for years to come, with 
our Government, on the subject. The practical details of the movement must now 
be laid and carried out in its incipiency, by a company or an association of private 
individuals, of influence, character, and standing, throughout the whole country, but 
who shall at the same time be backed, animated, and cheered, by able supporters 
and defenders in Congress. This association ought to be formed as early as possi- 
ble, and when formed, it ought to patronize and encourage the organization that 
the colored people have effected among themsslves for this purpose. An intelligent 
and able commissioner ought to be dispatched in behalf of this association, to enter 
into stipulations with the Central American Government in regard to these conteni- 
plated emigrants. And this commissioner might be accompanied by some intelli- 
gent colored man, to be named by their Board or Central Committee, in whom they 
might repose the utmost confidence, when he brought back a report of the condition, 
prospects, and advantages, of that country. 

Arrangements thus made for emigration, and a pioneer list of emigrants enrolled, 
consisting of agricultural laborers, mechanics, teachers, and professional men, then 
this association, composed of distinguished individuals, will invoke philanthropic 
contributions of money, mechanics' tools, and agricultural implements, to fit out and 
facilitate the removal of such of this number of emigrants as might need aid in 
these respects. 

Thus prepared, the first expedition will sail, consisting of fifty families, or two 
hundred and fifty persons, and every three months thereafter, for the ensuing five 
years, let the same number be quietly transported. At the end of this period, I will 
guaranty the most skeptical and prejudiced will be converted to the scheme, and 
our Government will at last feel the necessity of making it a national movement, by 
throwing in some way her protecting ajgis over this rapidly-accumulating portion 
of her own depleted population, that will then promise to be so advantageous to her 
in every respect, commercially and politically, in their newly-acquired homes in our 
highway to the Pacific, * * * 

With this hope, I remain your obedient servant, 

JAMES THEODORE HOLLY, 

New Ha vex, January, 30, 1858. Corresponding Secretary. 

Letter from J. M. Whitfield, Editor of the African- American Repository, [a color' 

ed man.) 

Buffalo, New York, Feb. 1, 1858. 

Dear Sir : Having read a portion of your late speech in Congress in favor of 
colonizing free blacks in Central or South America, I have taken the liberty of 
addressing you, feeling, as one of that race, and an advocate of the same policy, a 
vital interest in its success. 

In August, 1854, a Convention was held at Cleveland of those colored men in fa- 
vor of emigration to the West India islands. Central and South America. That 
Convention organized a Board of P]migration, which appointed a commissioner 
(Rev. J. T. Holly, now rector of St. Luke's church. New Haven) to go to Haytl, and 
confer with the Haytien Government upon the subject. 

That Government expressed itself ready to offer the most liberal inducements to 
emigrants, and to grant them every assistance in its power. It was also intended 



38 

to send a commissioner to the British islands, New Granada, and the Central 
American States, but for laclv of pecuniary means were unable to do so. And here, 
allow me to say, is one of the curses of our condition in this country : we are all so 
miserably poor that we are unable to help each other, and so scattered that it is 
impossible to have union of action even where there is perfect unanimity of senti- 
ment; so that while there are hundreds — yes, thousands — of enterprising and industri- 
our colored men, ready and anxious to embark immediately in any i'easible move- 
ment of emigration to either of the places named, the means to commence such a 
movement properly are not attainable among them. * * * 

The Colonization Society removes to Afi*ica a (gw hundreds yearly, at an expense 
which, if judiciously applied according to the practical principles developed by Mr, 
Thayer in his organized system of Kansas emigration, would plant twice as many 
ihoutiands in Central America, with everything requisite for their rapid progress ; and 
the true interest of both the white and black races seems to require such a policy. 

The fact is, the Saxon and negro are the only positive races on this continent, 
and the two are destined to absorb into themselves all the others ; and, like two 
positive poles, they repel each other ; and if the one is destined to occupy all the 
temperate regions of this hemisphere, it is equally certain that the other will 
predominate within the tropics. The Slavery propagandists unwittingly admit 
the same, when they declare negro labor to be indispensable in those regions. 
The question which suggests itself to the intelligent mind is, shall things be 
permitted and encouraged to reach their natural developments, which no combi- 
nation of circumstances can prevent, (however much it may retard it,) l)y the peace- 
ful influence of free labor ? or shall the Slavery propagandists be allowed to inter- 
fere and check for a time the march of civilization, when the ultimate result must 
be to usher in, through war and anarchy, the very same state of things, which might 
have been much sooner and easier reached by peaceful and legitimate means, to the 
great benefit of the whole civilized world ? You have answered the question in a 
manner which indicates the far-seeing statesman as well as the noble-hearted phi- 
lanthropist, and I sincerely hope that a majority of Congress may be induced to 
adopt the same just and liberal policy. 

Respectfully, yours, J. M. WHITFIELD. 



54 W 
















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